Concern over the European Union is rising in political discussion on different occurrencies. Just a few weeks ago, we published the results of a survey about independence and the various attitudes towards it in different European countries, following the recent events of Catalonia and the historical tensions in other regions with a pattern of independence movements.
As part of the same research in seven European countries, WIN carried out another survey discussing the level of confidence in EU and future perceptions on the union in a 5 years’ period. The questions were proposed by Doxa, the Italian member of WIN.
The countries involved were France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and UK. Interesting results emerge from each of the participating countries, also with some differences among them, according to both recent history and historical approaches to the European Union.
At a general level, those who declare to have confidence in the EU are just the 42% of the respondents (“A great deal of confidence” 7%; “Some confidence” 35%); the non-confident (“not very much” or “not at all”) prevail with 52%; 6% didn’t know nor answered.
The “Net confidence” Index, calculated with the difference between the percentage of confident and non-confident, corresponds to -10 at a general level. Among the most confident countries we have Ireland (+24) and Spain (+12), while Italy tops the bottom of the list with the highest level of non-confidence (71%) and the lowest net confidence index (-44).
The EU in five years from now:
Making predictions in a 5 years’ time, 62% of the total sample thinks that their country will (still) be a member of the EU, while the remaining 38% is split almost equally between the remaining options: 13% thinks that their country will not be part of the EU anymore; 12% thinks the EU will not exist anymore; 13% does not know / does not answer.
It has to be noted that the global result of 62% is very negatively influenced by the only 10% of respondents in UK who consider their country will remain a member of EU – clearly a direct consequence of the outcome of the Brexit referendum and political decisions which followed. The remaining 6 countries (four of them being also among the founding countries of EU – France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) show a similar response pattern among them, variating from the 63-65% in Italy and the Netherlands, up to a 75-78% in Germany and Spain, with very close results also in France (71%) and Ireland (74%).
Download full Press Release by Doxa at this link.
You can also refer to the raw data tables here.