And the French, like their southern European compatriots, have lost confidence in their elected leader. The French now have less faith in the European Union as an institution than do the Italians or the Spanish. Only the Greeks and Italians have less belief in the benefits of economic union than do the French. The French share similar worries about inflation and unemployment with the Spanish, the Italians and the Greeks at levels of concern not held by the Germans. Positive assessment of the economy in France have fallen by more than half since before the crisis and is now comparable to that in the south. But the French public mood is now looking less like that in Germany and more like that in the southern peripheral nations of Spain, Italy and Greece.
Differences in opinion across the Rhine have long existed. And 58% now have a bad impression of the European Union as an institution, up 18 points from 2012.Įven more dramatically, French attitudes have sharply diverged from German public opinion on a range of issues since the beginning of the euro crisis. The French are also beginning to doubt their commitment to the European project, with 77% believing European economic integration has made things worse for France, an increase of 14 points since last year.
They are negative about their leadership: 67% think President Francois Hollande is doing a lousy job handling the challenges posed by the economic crisis, a criticism of the president that is 24 points worse than that of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy. The French are negative about the economy, with 91% saying it is doing badly, up 10 percentage points since 2012. In just the past year, the public mood has soured dramatically across the board. No European country is becoming more dispirited and disillusioned faster than France. These are among the key findings of a new study by the Pew Research Center conducted in eight European Union nations among 7,646 respondents from March 2 to March 27, 2013. Nevertheless, despite the vocal political debate about austerity, a clear majority in five of eight countries surveyed still think the best way to solve their country’s economic problems is to cut government spending, not spend more money. The International Monetary Fund expects the European Union economy to not grow at all in 2013 and to still be performing below its pre-crisis average in 2018. But Europe’s economic fortunes have worsened in the past year, and prospects for a rapid turnaround remain elusive. These negative sentiments are driven, in part, by the public’s generally glum mood about economic conditions and could well turn around if the European economy picks up. The southern nations of Spain, Italy and Greece are becoming ever more estranged as evidenced by their frustration with Brussels, Berlin and the perceived unfairness of the economic system. The prolonged economic crisis has created centrifugal forces that are pulling European public opinion apart, separating the French from the Germans and the Germans from everyone else. But this fascination with the crisis country of the moment has masked a broader phenomenon: the erosion of Europeans’ faith in the animating principles that have driven so much of what they have accomplished internally. The sick man label – attributed originally to Russian Czar Nicholas I in his description of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century – has more recently been applied at different times over the past decade and a half to Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France.
And only in Germany does at least half the public back giving more power to Brussels to deal with the current economic crisis. The favorability of the EU has fallen from a median of 60% in 2012 to 45% in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future. Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis.
The European Union is the new sick man of Europe.
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