Young Europeans losing faith in democracy, poll finds
A majority from Europe's generation Z – 57% – prefer democracy to any other form of government. Rates of support varied significantly, however, reaching just 48% in Poland and only about 51-52% in Spain and France, with Germany highest at 71%.
More than one in five – 21% – would favour authoritarian rule under certain, unspecified circumstances. This was highest in Italy at 24% and lowest in Germany with 15%. In France, Spain and Poland the figure was 23%.
Nearly one in 10 across the nations said they did not care whether their government was democratic or not, while another 14% did not know or did not answer.
Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at Berlin's Free University, who worked on the study, said: 'Among people who see themselves as politically to the right of centre and feel economically disadvantaged, their support of democracy sinks to just one in three.
'Democracy is under pressure, from within and without.'
The study was carried out in April and May. More than 6,700 people between the ages of 16 and 26 in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Poland responded to the ninth annual survey by the YouGov institute for the Tui Foundation, which funds projects dedicated to youth in Europe.
Forty-eight per cent worry that the democratic system in their own country is endangered, including 61% in Germany, where the economy – Europe's biggest – is ailing and the far right has made significant inroads, fuelled in part by increased backing from young voters.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House, the rise of China, and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine have shifted power away from Europe in the respondents' perception, with just 42% counting the EU among the top three global players.
Despite – or perhaps because of – Brexit, the figure was highest among Britons at 50%. Of those surveyed in the UK, 73% wanted a return to the EU, while nearly half of young Europeans (47%) sought stronger ties between the EU and Britain.
The US was seen by 83% as part of the power trio, followed by China with 75% and Russia on 57%.
Rising polarisation is also driving young Europeans to the ideological fringes along with their elders, but a notable gender divide has emerged in the process.
Nearly one in five – 19% – described themselves as politically right of centre, up from 14% in 2021, while 33% called themselves centrists, 32% as leftist and 16% without any designation.
Women in Germany, France and Italy identified as progressive in higher numbers than four years ago, while young men in Poland and Greece have grown more conservative in the same period.
Support for tougher restrictions on migration has grown across the board since 2021, to 38% from 26%.
Most young Europeans expressed hope in the EU's potential, and two in three overwhelmingly supported their country remaining in the bloc if it still was. But 39% described the EU as not particularly democratic and just 6% said their own national governments worked well, with little need for significant changes.
More than half – 53% – felt the EU was too focused on details and trivial matters. They would like the bloc to tackle the high cost of living, bolster defence against external threats and create better conditions for companies to improve the economy.
Elke Hlawatschek, the head of the Tui Foundation, said: 'The European project, which has brought us peace, freedom of movement and economic progress for decades, is seen as unwieldy.'
Greek people see the strongest need for fundamental overhaul of their political system and are most sceptical about the EU, which Faas described as rooted in enduring trauma of the eurozone debt crisis that drove their country's economy to the brink.
Despite stronger support for climate protection among young Europeans, just one in three said it should take priority over economic growth. The figure has slipped from 44% in 2021.
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The Guardian
11 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Europe is scrambling to form a united front and regain relevance in the Iran crisis
Exposed as divided and marginalised during the Iran crisis, European nations are scrambling to retrieve a place at the Middle East negotiating table, fearing an impulsive Donald Trump has diminishing interest in stabilising Iran or the wider region now that he believes he has achieved his key objective of wiping out Tehran's nuclear programme. On Tuesday the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, was the latest senior European figure to phone the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, offering to be a facilitator and urging Tehran not to leave the crisis in a dangerous limbo by keeping UN weapons inspectors out of Iran. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has even broken a three-year silence to speak to Vladimir Putin about the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, including how a deal could be struck between Iran and the US on a restricted civil nuclear programme. Macron has been involved in Iranian diplomacy for a decade and came close to engineering a rapprochement between Trump and the then Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, at the UN general assembly in 2018. But faced with what Iran regards as craven European support for Israeli and American airstrikes that have left more than 930 people killed and as many as 5,000 injured, Tehran is not placing much faith in the continent's ability to influence the White House. For Europe, this signals a slow slide into irrelevance. The three major European powers known as the E3 – France, Germany and the UK – were once key fixtures in Iran's diplomacy and played a central role in brokering the Iran nuclear deal which they signed alongside the EU, the US, China, Russia and Iran in 2015. Europe had little input in the US's recent negotiating strategy with Iran led by Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and was given just over an hour's official warning before the Israeli and US attacks. The one meeting that the E3 foreign minsters held during the crisis with Iranian diplomats in Geneva on 20 June proved a failure and was followed by the US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. France claimed to have helped Israel repel Iranian drones. Trump crowed afterwards that 'Iran doesn't want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this one.' From the Iranian perspective, Europe has long been a disappointing negotiating partner, repeatedly failing to show any independence from the US. When Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal in 2018, the E3 condemned the move in a joint statement issued by their then-leaders, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Macron. But they did nothing effective to pursue an independent strategy to lift European sanctions on Iran as they had promised. The fear that European firms trading with Iran would be sanctioned by the US was too great. The view from Tehran, it was felt, was that Europe's timidity left it with no choice but to follow the policy of nuclear brinkmanship, including gradually increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium. At the start of Trump's second term, the E3 plus Kallas tried again to insert themselves into the process by holding three low-key meetings with Iranian negotiators. But Araghchi was always angling to speak to Washington, telling the Guardian of his discussions with the Europeans: 'Perhaps we are talking to the wrong people.' After Trump signalled he was willing to speak to Iran bilaterally and showed some flexibility about Tehran's right to enrich uranium, Iran cast Europe aside. Iran believes Europe played a role either through naivety or complicity in opening the door for the Israeli attack by tabling a motion of censure at the board of the UN nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Such motions have been passed before at the IAEA and usually led to Iran retaliating by increasing its stocks of enriched uranium. But the 12 June motion was different – for the first time in 20 years the board found Iran in breach of its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Europe had to take this step if it is to use its right as a signatory to the 2015 deal to reimpose sanctions on Iran before the deal expires on 15 October. Due to the way the deal was negotiated, neither Russia nor China can veto Europe reimposing sanctions. America is no longer party to the deal so this power to reintroduce UN sanctions is Europe's diplomatic re-entry point into the Iranian file. European diplomats insist that the IAEA censure motion was necessary, that they had no option due to Iran's mounting stocks of highly enriched uranium that had no possible purpose in a civilian nuclear programme. Europe also still hoped the talks between the US and Iran, mediated by Oman, would bear fruit, and had not foreseen the US giving the green light for Israel to attack. Since the Israeli strikes, European unity has frayed further. Britain has largely opted for opacity, but it was clear from what ministers did not say that the government's legal advice was that the Israeli attack could not be justified as an act of self-defence under the UN charter. France openly asserted that the attack was unlawful. By contrast, Germany endorsed all that Israel has done. At the G7 summit in mid-June, the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said: 'This is the dirty work that Israel is doing, for all of us.' Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, told parliament that 'Israel has the right to defend itself and protect its people. Let me say clearly that, if Israel and the US have now managed to set back the Iranian nuclear programme, it will make Israel and its neighbourhood more secure.' Asked by the newspaper Die Zeit if he believed Israel's actions were lawful, he said Germany did not have the same quality intelligence sources as the US and Israel, but he had to trust their belief that Iran was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. 'They told us that, from their perspective, this is necessary – and we must accept that.' Such remarks have left Iranian diplomats spitting about European double standards over the sanctity of international law. By contrast, Enrique Mora, the EU's point person on Iran from 2015 to early 2025, has written a scathing piece in which he says Israel has killed nuclear diplomacy and Iran's nuclear knowledge cannot be destroyed. He wrote: 'If Iran now chooses the militarization of its nuclear capabilities, if it now decides to move toward a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic: no one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025, may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear programme was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.' There are different strategies Europe can pursue. It can, like Germany, show Iran there is no daylight between the E3 and Israel and assert that Iran can only have a civil nuclear programme that excludes domestic enrichment of uranium. It can press ahead with the reimposition of sanctions and hope that Iran buckles. The alternative is for Europe to champion a compromise that Tehran can wear. In a recent statement, the European Council on Foreign Relations said 'maximalist demands on Iran – including negotiating over missiles now viewed by Tehran as its main deterrence umbrella – will likely push the country to use every means still available to reach nuclear breakout. A more viable endgame would involve a return of wide scale inspections by international monitors and an immediate, substantial roll-back of Iranian uranium enrichment. The goal should be Iran pursuing this enrichment through a regional consortium backed by the United States.' That is broadly closer to the French position. Europe will never hold sway like Israel or the US, but it has one last chance to help create something durable, and prevent the Iranian crisis becoming a nuclear proliferation crisis for the whole region.
The Guardian
11 minutes ago
- The Guardian
To Starmer, his achievements are obvious. As a thought experiment, let's see things through his eyes
He doesn't look like the innovative type, but Keir Starmer is staging a radical experiment. He is testing out a theory of politics a matter of months after it was seemingly – and spectacularly – disproved and, in the process, hoping to pull off a turnaround that would constitute a comeback so stunning it would be closer to a resurrection. The theory in question is that if you deliver practical improvements to the lives of voters, they will reward you at the ballot box. Its guiding principle is 'show, don't tell', with the emphasis on results rather than talk, pragmatism rather than ideology. He's not the first to try it: this was also the animating creed of Joe Biden's presidency – and we know how that worked out. So far the approach seems to be bearing similarly sour fruit in Britain. As Starmer marks one year since his landslide victory, Labour has suffered the biggest post-election drop in public approval since the Conservatives were tanked by Black Wednesday in 1992. The prime minister's personal numbers are the lowest ever recorded for a PM 12 months in: his net approval stands at -54 points. At the equivalent moment in October 2023, Rishi Sunak scored -37. No one has ever come back up from such depths. The PM appears unfazed by all this. It's not that he insists he knows how to climb out of the current hole; rather, he refuses to accept he or his government are in a hole at all. He has a list of first-year achievements he is proud of and, besides, he believes he was written off once before, early in his spell as leader of the opposition – only to plough on, methodically reaching each of the milestones he had set himself and, finally, to win. By way of an anniversary gift, let's assess Starmer as he wants to be assessed. Let's put aside the various missteps of the past year as 'noises off', or as the mere teething pains of a new government. Let us look past both the fiasco of this week's near-defeat on welfare, staved off only by a series of panicked concessions and U-turns, and last summer's baffling determination to strangle at birth any feelgood factor that may have greeted the ejection of a despised Tory government, filling the air instead with gloom and the promise that things would get worse before they got better. Let's not dwell on the one act of these past 12 months that cut through most to voters: the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. Let us instead judge Labour on its own terms: delivery. On that list of Starmer's, there's a decent range of items, from the three trade deals that had eluded the Conservatives – with the US, EU and India – to a fall in NHS waiting lists, down to their lowest level in two years; from the expansion of free school meals provision to increased wages. The trouble is, none of those achievements goes anywhere close to repairing the damage Labour itself says was done over the past decade and a half. Inside Downing Street, they still profess their shock at the state they found the country in. Whether it's overcrowded prisons or a dysfunctional water industry, so much is 'busted'. It is a herculean task to turn all that around, and especially to do it fast – all the more so when there is so little money to spend. Starmer might be calm about the fact that a great change hasn't happened within a year, but it requires a Panglossian optimism to believe it will come even within five, in time for the next election. In whichever direction you look, delivery is maddeningly hard. To take just one example, the government has won plaudits for its first moves on housing, including a target of an additional 1.5m homes in England by 2029. That means building 300,000 each year. But for the most recent 12-month period, the tally stood at just over 200,000. If everything goes right, Labour's planning reforms should eventually boost housebuilding by 25% – but that still won't be enough to reach its goal. Still, let's be like Starmer and hope his various plans work and the government really does deliver. The lesson of Biden is that even that won't be enough. In fairness, Labour's high command does get that point, acknowledging mere 'lines on a graph' or stats won't cut it. The improvement has to be felt in people's lives. And yet, that too may not be sufficient. Voters don't usually go in for gratitude; they are as likely to credit themselves as the government for a material advance in their circumstances. What's needed, and Team Starmer swear they understand this too, is a story, a narrative of where the country has been and where it could go next, that the public can follow. Land on the right one, and it gives you the time and space this government has been denied. Margaret Thatcher's self-proclaimed mission to wean Britain off a sclerotic state was compelling enough to make a virtue even of economic hardship: the bitterness of her medicine was deemed proof that it was working. With no equivalent story, every setback of Starmer's is taken in isolation, evidence that the government doesn't know what it's doing. The PM offers no persuasive explanation of what is happening or why it may take a while. That wrecks a party's relationship with the electorate, obviously, but also with its own MPs, as the increasingly restive and frustrated parliamentary Labour party attests. Most Labour folk admit this narrative weakness is their achilles heel, and that it stems from a deficiency in the leader himself. A lawyer, a technocrat, a manager: whatever word they use to describe the prime minister, no one ever accuses him of being a storyteller. The man who seems least worried by this narrative void is Starmer himself. The formative experience of his (short) political career was his early tenure as Labour leader, half a decade ago. Trailing far behind his then opponent, he read commentaries daily telling him that Boris Johnson was going to dominate British politics for the next 10 years and that his destiny was to replicate Neil Kinnock as a transitional figure, preparing the ground for someone else more capable of winning. Those prognosticators got him wrong then and, he believes, they have got him wrong now. Besides, in his mind, the narrative of his government is obvious. How could anyone look at all he has done so far and not see that the common thread is an earnest effort to improve the lives of ordinary working men and women? To him, it's so clear it scarcely needs to be spelled out. Unfortunately, as the last US president discovered, everything needs to be spelled out, a hundred times a day, on every conceivable platform and very loudly. The days of quiet, patient, unflashy achievement, eventually recognised by a grateful electorate, are long gone, if they ever existed. Starmer and those around him need to adapt to that reality soon. If he fails, there is a grinning master of the new politics, who revels in the primacy of talk over action, of grievance over solution, who is currently 10 points ahead – and waiting to pounce. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
The Independent
27 minutes ago
- The Independent
Almost half of Americans disapprove of Florida's ‘Alligator Alcatraz', new poll shows
A new poll has found that almost half of Americans disapprove of the new 'Alligator Alcatraz' set up in the Florida Everglades to house undocumented migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In all, 48 percent of the 2,983 people who responded to the YouGov survey on Thursday said they were not in favor of the facility while just 33 percent said they supported it, with another 18 percent unsure. While Republicans and Democrats were largely split along party lines, just 26 percent of respondents who identified themselves as independent voters said they backed the idea while 53 percent were against it. Another noteworthy finding from YouGov's poll was the revelation that 47 percent of Americans believe detainees are being treated too severely by ICE while 23 percent said they were being treated appropriately, 10 percent they were not being treated harshly enough, with the remainder unsure. The 'Alligator Alcatraz' was announced last month by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who explained in a social media video that it was being built over 39 square miles on the site of the disused Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, which lies west of Miami. The facility consists largely of tents, will have the capacity to house up to 5,000 people and cost $450m a year to run. Uthmeier gloated in the video that it would require minimal additional security due to its remote location, which is home to such dangerous wildlife as alligators and pythons. 'Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,' he beamed. He has since appeared on Newsmax to boast that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other 'communist members of Congress' would not be able to protest outside the center because they would not be able to find it. Trump himself visited it in person on Tuesday, accompanied by Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and seemed particularly taken with the threat the local wildlife posed. 'You don't always have land so beautiful and so secure,' he observed. 'We have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops in the form of alligators... I wouldn't want to run through the Everglades for long.' He recalled joking about running a moat populated by vicious creatures along the base of his U.S.-Mexico border wall during his first term. 'It was meant more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it,' he said. Trump also used the trip to threaten to arrest New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Noem's predecessor Alejandro Mayorkas, call his own predecessor Joe Biden 'a son of a b***h', suggest deporting American citizens who commit crimes and hint, even more darkly, that the 'Alligator Alcatraz' could be the first of many more detention centres. 'We'd like to see them in many states,' the president mused. 'And at some point, they might morph into a system.' The detention center has been equally well received by conservatives on Fox News, with Laura Ingraham telling DeSantis during a recent interview that she 'loved' the idea and panellists discussing it on the same network's Gutfeld! chat show saying they too relished the prospect. Comedian Joe Devito was particularly enthusiastic, telling guest host Tyrus, an ex-wrestler, that it amounted to ' The Shawshank Redemption meets Jurassic Park ' and going on to suggest that the government go further and staff it with grizzly bears and an 'evil squid' to frisk inmates with its tentacles. The figure appeared to be a reference to the total number of Latinos in the United States, chiming with U.S. Census data for the demographic, inviting an angry response from commentators on X.
