Trust in EU falls to record low

Trust in the European Union has fallen to a record low, a poll of its six biggest countries has found.

Eurobarometer, the EU’s polling organisation, questioned people from Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland and found that Euroscepticism has grown dramatically since 2007 as leaders struggle to deal with the union’s worst ever crisis.

After three years of financial and debt crises, currency concerns, austerity measures, bailouts and fears of surrounding the surrender of powers to Brussels, feelings of mistrust have tripled in certain member states.

In five of the six countries polled mistrust heavily outtweighed trust. This is in sharp contrast to 2007, when in all countries apart from Britain the opposite was true.

There was even a decline in confidence in countries which are historically pro-European such as Spain, Germany and Italy, the poll published in the Guardian found.

Britain, where Eurobarometer regularly finds widespread Euroscepticism, had one of the highest levels of mistrust - growing from 49 per cent to 69 per cent over the five years.

Spain had the biggest turnaround in opinion. Since 2007 trust in the EU has fallen from 65% to 20%, while mistrust more than tripled from 72% to 23%.

In 2007 56 per cent of Germans "tended to trust" the EU, compared to now when 59 per cent "tend to mistrust".

In France it has risen from 41 per cent to 56 per cent, and in Italy mistrust has almost doubled from 28 per cent to 53 per cent.

Poland, which has been a member state for less than a decade, is the only country where people had more trust than mistrust the EU, but the number of those who had faith in the insitution dropped from 68 per cent to 48 per cent.

The six countries are the biggest in the EU and jointly make up more than two out of three EU citizens.

The figures suggest the crisis of political legitimacy facing EU leaders is much greater than previously thought.

“The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, from the think tank the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), who analysed the findings.

People believe that their national democracy is being damaged by the handling of the Euro crisis, he added.

The findings were released as the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, vowed to fight back against politicians blaming Brussels for unpopular policies - and taking the credit themselves when it suits them.

Speaking at the launch in Brussels of a New Narrative For Europe campaign, he acknowledged that "European fatigue" was setting in among people hit by the economic crisis and job losses.

European unity had to be fought for every day, he said, particularly in the face of a resurgence of populism and nationalism.

Mr Barroso said: "We need to resist, to explain that it is not fair, when systematically politicians at national level tend to nationalise the successes and Europeanise the failures."

Mr Barroso went on: "Let us be clear - the indifference of many pro-Europeans is also a risk. We cannot allow such a pessimistic and destructive agenda to dictate our actions.

"We must, therefore, abandon the illusion that we can respond to European problems only with national solutions: solidarity, social cohesion and the social market economy lie at the very heart of the European consensus. They must be defended and preserved."

But he admitted: "At a time when so many Europeans are faced with unemployment, uncertainty and growing inequality, a sort of 'European fatigue' has set in, coupled with a lack of understanding."