The Africa programme analyses the geopolitics of Africa-Europe appointments. In particular, the program analyzes the meetings between the African Union and the European Union to locate teams and artistic strategies for foreign policy. It also focuses on two regions that are specifically for Europe. : the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.
The Asia program aims to get Europe to recalibrate its relations with China and its Asian partners. The program analyzes China’s internal situation, its role in the region, and its developing global influence. It also places a renewed emphasis on strengthening Europe’s relations with the Indo-Pacific. region, specifically with India and Japan.
The European Power programme aims to help Europeans scale up sustainable policy responses to the upheavals affecting the European Union’s ability to act with unity on the global stage. This includes researching the way forward for enlargement, the transition of power and the European Union for Ukraine.
The Middle East and North Africa Programme aims at a coherent European timetable in the pursuit of regional interests. The programme works with European and regional governments, local voices and civil society to promote channels of discussion and provide direct policy recommendations to ensure conflict-escalation, regional stabilisation and democratic transition.
The U. S. program is helping Europeans create policy responses to adjustments in U. S. domestic and foreign policy. The programme aims to improve transatlantic relations by exploring obstacles to a more balanced partnership and proposing concepts to overcome them.
The ‘Wider Europe’ programme aims to ensure that the European Union protects its interests and values in the Western Balkans, Turkey, Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. The programme also supports the work of EU decision-makers on a unified and coherent policy to address the difficult situations resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ahead of this year’s European Parliament elections, political leaders are considering which issues will shape the next phase of European politics. The left-right divide is a less useful indicator of voting behavior than before, not least because in many countries, parties on both sides of the political spectrum converge on many key issues, from migration to social spending. The split between pro- and anti-EU parties is also arguably not a smart indicator, unlike the 2019 election, which took place while Brexit was being proposed. was still being negotiated: the top far-right parties reneged on their promise to leave the European Union. European Union, while no leader talks about a federal Europe. And in an environment of anxiety where 6 in 10 citizens feel that their respective countries are going in the wrong direction, the most popular department among political strategists – between hope and worry – has become so unbalanced in the direction of worry that can’t help anymore. like in the old days. So how can we think about the future of European politics?
To help answer this question, the European Council on Foreign Relations commissioned a survey in 11 European countries: EU states, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Romania, Portugal and Estonia; and two non-EU European countries: Great Britain and Switzerland. He mapped aid by component in relation to attitudes in other policy spaces and attitudes towards the functionality of European establishments and national governments. We conclude that mainstream policy research lacks an understanding of competing factors. existential traumas they are going through and among other Member States. We believe that these elements can predict the future of politics on the continent. (The survey was part of a global public opinion survey that also included ten non-European countries and was the focus of our previous report. )
In the last fifteen years, Europe has experienced five major crises. The climate crisis has forced Europeans to believe that the world is in danger. The global currency crisis has led Europeans to doubt that their young people can enjoy a better standard of living than their own. The migration crisis has sparked an identity panic centered on issues of multiculturalism and the meaning of nation-states. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of our fitness systems in a globalized world. And the war in Ukraine has shattered the specter that a primary war would never return to the European continent. These five crises have several things in common: they have been felt across Europe, albeit with different intensities; many Europeans experienced them as an existential risk; they have had a major impact on government policies; And by no means are they over.
The term “polycrisis” has arisen to remind us that all five crises occur more or less simultaneously, that the surprise of their cumulative interaction is more overwhelming than their sum, and that these other crises have no single cause or solution. It is clear that the climate crisis has triggered migration; And that Covid-19 and war have replaced the economic policies of governments. But an underestimated feature of the polycrisis is that, for other societies and social groups, one crisis plays a dominant role over the others. French President Emmanuel Macron got this right when he contrasted those who are worried about the end of the month (economic crisis) and those who are worried about the end of the world (climate crisis). This is what we mean when we say that everyone needs to revel in their own crisis.
The survey tells the story of existing European politics and the reports that emerge from those crises. It shows that in vital spaces of debate such as climate and migration, political parties that focus on one of those types of crises are now diversifying to address other resources of trauma. In the big European election year of 2024, this will have profound consequences for the continent’s destiny.
Which of the five crises is the most critical in shaping Europeans’ vision of the future?And for which European citizens, exactly?
The central conclusion of our research is that no single crisis dominates the collective European imagination. Climate change, the war in Ukraine, covid-19, immigration, and global economic turmoil – each of these five issues has its own sizeable ‘constituency’ of people who cite one particular crisis as the one that most preoccupies them. These constituencies are unevenly distributed between different generations and between different countries.
Given that the nine EU countries surveyed make up 75 percent of the EU27 population and are located in the bloc’s geographical regions, we extrapolated the effects to estimate the length of the other constituencies in the upcoming European Parliament elections. Among the EU27’s voting-age population of 372 million people, this would mean that around 74 million people cite climate, 74 million Covid-19 and 71 million the economic crisis as their main concern. This is followed by 58 million EU citizens who are primarily concerned about immigration. and 50 million that are focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Another 47 million people find it difficult to associate them with one of the five crises. If these groups were constituted in the European Parliament, that would be their constitution.
We believe that those five teams will be the other “tribes in crisis” in Europe. Like all tribes, they have a common origin story, they share the bureaucracy of language and sensibilities, they have totems and leaders, and they have internal fractures.
The crisis tribes are limited to a single country and are unevenly distributed throughout Europe.
Germany is the only country where the largest number of people consider immigration to be the factor they consider most important; Recent migrant arrivals would likely have brought back memories of 2015, when the country took in a million more people, including Syrians fleeing Bashar al-Assad. France and Denmark are the only EU countries whose citizens are facing the ultimate life crisis. . Italian and Portuguese citizens point to the economic crisis of the last fifteen years; The euro crisis will have left a long tail in these countries. And in Spain, Britain and Romania, others see the Covid-19 pandemic as the challenge that has affected them the most. Estonians, Poles and Danes see the war in Ukraine as the ultimate transformative crisis.
Europeans also differ in their assessment of their governments’ functionality in crisis management. For example, members of the immigrant tribe feel that their governments have done a very poor job on immigration, while the tribe of Ukrainians is more positive about how their governments’ national leaders are handling the war.
If the War Tribe needed a capital, it would probably be Tallinn: as the capital of the country with the highest percentage of people in that tribe, Poland and Denmark also see war at the most sensitive point on their crisis lists (in Denmark, this is the case). climate-related).
And while some crises loom large in national imaginations, others barely feature. For example, Estonians’ worries about the war in Ukraine and the economy dominate above all else. Immigration is the main cause for concern for only a handful of Poles, Estonians, Romanians, and Portuguese, even while refugees from Ukraine continue to arrive. Germans appear unfazed by economic woes. And an almost shockingly low number of people in France, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain name the war Ukraine as the crisis that has most impacted the way they look at their future.
The crises divide Europeans according to age, gender and education.
Unsurprisingly, young people pick the climate crisis over other crises, with 24 per cent of 18-29-year-olds particularly concerned. In Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland, young people tend to prioritise climate issues above all else. However, in other countries, young people are more focused on problems such as global economic turmoil (in Estonia and Portugal), the war in Ukraine (in Poland), and covid-19 (in Spain and Romania). In contrast, looking jointly at all countries, the over-70s are most mobilised by the war in Ukraine (27 per cent), and they are more focused on immigration than the younger generations. Covid-19 is the only crisis which, across Europe, does not appear to preoccupy one generation more than any other.
As young people worry about the future, it can be expected that older generations’ anxieties about Ukraine will be further shaped through their Cold War experience. It’s possible that similar responses to the pandemic will emerge from how it has affected everyone.
In some places, women more than men decide that COVID-19 is the crisis that has affected them the most. This is evident in Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland and Romania. Meanwhile, men tend to focus more on immigration than women in Spain, France, Britain and Switzerland.
In terms of education, highly savvy Americans in the 11 European countries see climate change as the most transformative crisis, second only to economic turmoil. Conversely, other people with fewer formal degrees are more likely to be affected by immigration. This trend can be observed in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Poland.
Europe’s crises put people through experiences whose impacts do not map neatly onto left or right, pro- or anti-immigration, establishment or populist divisions. Instead, running through all these experiences is a strong sense of disappointment resulting from government inadequacies in crisis management – and a fear that the crises might return.
The two crises dominating the media and political debate in the run-up to the elections are climate and migration. And the struggle between the two tribes that stick to those problems as much as possible becomes a clash of two “extinction rebellions. “Activists are concerned about the disappearance of human lives and other people, anti-immigration activists are concerned about the disappearance of their nations and their cultural identity.
Those who see migration as the biggest crisis will likely vote for center-right or far-right parties. Our knowledge shows that in Germany, this means a high chance of voting for the AfD; in France, for the national demonstration of Marine Le Pen or the Reconquista! by Eric Zemmour.
The inverse is true for climate, where those who consider this the most important issue overwhelmingly flock to Green parties or parties such as the Socialists in Spain or Civic Coalition and the Left in Poland.
One might suppose that a common characteristic of both the climate and immigration tribes is that they are particularly sensitive to the temporal dimension of politics. They believe that if specific actions are not taken today, they will become impossible to implement tomorrow. They share the sentiment that we live on borrowed time.
Interestingly, however, our polling suggests that these two crisis tribes experience very different dynamics once their preferred parties are in power. When the migration tribe sees right-wing parties in power, its adherents tend to become more relaxed about the issue. In Italy, immigration is surprisingly low among the concerns of many voters: just 10 per cent of the country’s population, and only 17 per cent of Brothers of Italy supporters, describe it as their most transformative crisis, regardless of the fact that the Brothers of Italy was elected on a strong anti-immigration platform. A similar picture was evident in Poland under Law and Justice before that party lost the recent general election. This is reminiscent of shifts in public opinion in Great Britain, where voters’ attitudes towards immigration improved after the Brexit referendum, even while the numbers of people arriving grew.
The climate tribe behaves in the opposite way. Our vote in Germany shows that citizens remain concerned about the climate crisis, even when their government has a strong climate agenda; They don’t see the challenge solved. In short, the electorate would possibly see the election of a far-right government as the answer to fears about immigration – even if that doesn’t really change much – but they don’t believe that the climate emergency will end after the Greens’ election.
For the other crises, the dynamics are quite different. Those in the economy tribe are not united by a left or right politics, but by an anti-government stance. They often dislike whichever government is in power, no matter its political orientation. For example, in Italy, 31 per cent in this group say they do not plan to vote in the upcoming European election, and a further 16 per cent are unsure how they will vote. In France, 40 per cent of this group do not know which party best reflects their ideas.
This can also potentially be explained by the lack of primary difference between the austerity policies pursued by right-wing and left-wing governments in 2009-2010. Rather than reinforcing the left-right divide, the economic crisis would possibly have reduced its importance. Over the course of other crises, countries that had center-left governments in their positions repositioned them with center-right parties, and vice versa. So the economic crisis tribesmen are, in a sense, the most common protest voters.
The members of the war tribe and the pandemic tribe are much more incumbent-friendly. As our previous report demonstrated, the pandemic has weakened rather than strengthened populist parties in Europe, at least in the short term. But in the long term, things could work out differently if one goes by the recent elections in several EU member states, such as in the Netherlands, Slovakia, and some German regions. These revealed the existence of anti-lockdown, anti-vax, and anti-war constituencies born in the time of covid-19 and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They appear to be strong political identities.
Examining the distribution of tribes between parties shows that some tribes have a very concentrated political base. This means, for example, that the far-right could use its credibility on migration to branch out to other voters through a focus on climate, the cost of living, and wider issues. The same is true for climate, where young people are highly engaged and likely to provide a solid electoral base if political parties can frame the European election as a referendum on the topic. Many of the other mainstream parties are ‘catch-all crisis’ parties, which focus on more than one of the crises or different combinations of them. Lacking a single crisis constituency, they may face difficulty enthusing their supporters to vote in the European election, which traditionally has a low turnout.
Jean Monnet said: “Europe will be forged in crisis and will be the sum of the solutions adopted to these crises”. But what happens when people start to believe that neither their own country or the EU will be able to solve crises?
This is the backdrop to the forthcoming European Parliament election – where many citizens may be more motivated by anxiety of past crises returning than a hope for a better future. At the last election, the central struggle was between populists who wanted to turn their backs on European integration and mainstream parties that wanted to save the European project from Brexit and Donald Trump. But the next election will be about projections rather than projects. It will be a competition between rival fears of rising temperatures, immigration, inflation, and military conflicts.
All five crises are vital in the run-up to elections, but all have other mobilization potentials. The economic crisis ends up demoralizing other people instead of motivating them to go to the polls. Our research suggests that status quo parties campaigning on the economy would likely struggle to perform well.
In the months immediately following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war captured the continent’s attention like no other issue. But citizens do not necessarily understand this as an existential crisis facing Europe as a whole; many might see the war as an existential crisis only for Ukraine and some of its next neighbors. In fact, most members of the warrior tribe believe that NATO and the EU are not involved in a war against Russia. it broadens between European elites, who still talk about doing whatever it takes to prop up Kiev, and their voters, who are more focused on other crises. The war between Israel and Hamas, which began after our on-the-ground research was conducted, is very likely to have a more potent effect on European politics in some countries than the Russia-Ukraine war, but it would not be unexpected if its consequences primarily benefit the immigration tribe, thus altering the situation.
It is climate and migration which appear likely to shape this year’s election, as suggested by the recent general election result in the Netherlands, which put an anti-immigrant party at the top of the poll and the pro-climate left-wing alliance led by Frans Timmermans in second place. The climate tribe is the most pro-EU tribe. The nature of this crisis demands broad international cooperation, so this tribe might well regard the EU as more able to deliver climate action than the national states.
Unlike the climate tribe, members of the migration tribe tend to be more EU-sceptic. They are the only group in which there is a majority that expects the bloc to fall apart in the next 20 years. Its members are most likely to vote for right-wing or far-right parties. They are the least supportive of renewable energy (although a majority still favours it), and they are the biggest fans of nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Many of them say they would prefer a leader who stands up for their country’s independence rather than one who engages in international cooperation.
In the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament elections, many were concerned that populist and anti-European parties would take advantage of electorate concerns about immigration to gain a blocking minority in the EU legislative assembly. Former White House lead strategist Steve Bannon had been hoping it would be the third triumph of a bigoted foreigner after Brexit and Trump’s election. But in the end, these populist parties did not triumph and there was an unexpected mobilization of the pro-European electorate that sought to save the EU from disintegration.
The classical parties would probably have realized that it would be difficult for them to turn the next elections into a referendum on the long term of the European project. As a result, they are increasingly examining the two most mobilizing crises – migration and climate – and coming up with methods that may also disrupt the European political debates that characterized those crises. The climate emergency has been the main European liberal cause, as demonstrated by projects led through the European Commission such as Net Zero, the Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanism and Fit for 55. Today, however, the climate is being ” renationalized”, as a green policy. The negative reactions are becoming a harsh rallying cry for the protest right.
Migration, on the other hand, was once the main nationalist cause, but European institutions and pro-European governments are now Europeanizing the factor. The European status quo has taken up this factor with the aim of finding a European solution that is not unusual, adding by adopting a European policy that is not unusual in the field of migration and asylum.
Decisions taken by European leaders in the coming months on the other crises will also shape the future of Europe. Member states will need to answer questions on Ukraine’s accession to the EU, support for the war effort, the budget for the European Green Deal, and indeed the details of a common asylum policy.
Each of Europe’s five crises will claim many lives, but it is at the ballot box that they will live, die or be resurrected. The European elections will not only be a festival between left and right – between Eurosceptics and pro-Europeans – but also a war for supremacy between the crisis-ridden European tribes. Many voters will focus on avoiding a repeat of their own crisis.
This report is based on an opinion survey of adult populations (aged 18 and over) carried out in September and October 2023 in 11 European countries (Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland). The total number of respondents was 15,081.
Surveys were conducted through Datapraxis and YouGov in Denmark (1,040; 26 September – 2 October), France (2,079; 26 September – 6 October), Germany (2,036; 26 September – 5 October), Great Britain. – Brittany (2,043; 26 September – 6 October), Italy (1,530; 26 September – 5 October), Poland (1,069; 26 September – 4 October), Portugal (1,050; 26 September – 4 October), Romania (1,104; 26 September – 3 October), Spain (1,014; 26 September – 3 October) and Switzerland (1,103; 26 September – 3 October); and through Datapraxis and Norstat in Estonia (1,013; 26 September – 9 October).
In this policy brief, the effects for “Europe” correspond to the 11 European countries discussed above, and the effects for “the EU” correspond to the nine EU countries (i. e. , all but Switzerland and Great Britain). those countries are used, unless otherwise specified.
Segmentation into other “crisis tribes” is based on answers to the following question: “Which of the following issues has replaced your thinking about your long-term peak over the past decade?) climate change, (b) immigration, (c) the Covid-19 pandemic, (d) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, (e) the global economic crisis, (f) others, and (g) I don’t know.
In the EU countries, respondents were asked to assess the EU’s response to these crises by answering the following question: “Do you think the European Union has generally done a good or bad job when it comes to its handling of each of the following issues?” with the available options being: (a) climate change, (b) immigration, (c) Covid-19 pandemic, (d) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, (e) Global economic turmoil. Meanwhile, in Switzerland and Great Britain, respondents assessed their government’s performance on these issues by answering the following question: “Do you think [Swiss/UK government] has generally done a good or bad job when it comes to its handling of each of the following issues?”
The number of eligible voters in the upcoming European Parliament election (almost 372 million) was estimated using International IDEA’s latest voting age population data for each of the EU27’s member states, adjusted by Eurostat latest population data for the countries that have lowered the voting age for this election.
Ivan Krastev is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He is the author of Is It Tomorrow Yet?: Paradoxes of the Pandemic, among many other publications.
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is responsible for The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict. He also hosts ECFR’s weekly podcast “The World in 30 Minutes. “
This publication would not have been imaginable without the regular work of the ECFR Unlock team, in particular Pawel Zerka, who did a regular job of analyzing the data to highlight key trends and help the authors refine their arguments. Adam Harrison was a brilliant editor of several drafts and greatly advanced the narrative flow of the text. Andreas Bock led the strategic media outreach and Nastassia Zenovich led the knowledge visualization, while Anand Sundar helped us navigate through the successive drafts. The authors would also like to thank Paul Hilder and his team at Datapraxis for their collaboration with us on the progression and research of the European survey discussed in the report. Despite these numerous and diverse contributions, any errors remain the responsibility of the authors.
ECFR has partnered with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Europa Think Tank and the International Centre for Security and Defence on this project.
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