Voters' Love for the EU Poses Problem for Europe's Far-Right
Anti-EU parties are surging across Europe, but the latest data shows: Europeans really like the European Union.
It doesn’t matter which European country you poll. Far-right parties seem to be on the rise everywhere. In Germany, the far-right AFD surged into first place in the polls. In France, Rassemblement National has been the frontrunner for a while, and in the Netherlands’ most recent election, Geert Wilders’ PVV finished a close second in the recent election.
These parties share a few positions. One of them is their disdain for the European Union. They may have mostly abolished earlier plans of a full DEXIT (Germany), FREXIT (France), or NEXIT (Netherlands) after the world watched Britain’s BREXIT-remorse unfold in real time, but they still plan to opt out of the European project. Rassemblement National advocates for a FREXIT in “all but name,” and the AFD party platform advocates for Germany to leave the Union for a “better” replacement (which doesn’t yet exist).
If we examine these parties, their strong anti-EU sentiment, as well as their fabulous poll numbers, we might get the idea that Europeans dislike the European Union. Funnily enough, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Citizens in All Member Countries Say EU Has a “Positive Impact”
The Spring 2025 Eurobarometer asked residents in all 27 member states whether they believe the EU has a positive or a negative effect on their lives. The result was quite stunning. A plurality of residents in every single member state said that the EU has a positive impact on their lives. Not a single country showed a net-negative result. Meaning all across the map, including in countries where EU skeptics are leading the polls, residents seem to be very fond of the EU and its impact on their personal lives.
While the “positive impact” response outweighed the “negative impact” response in all nations, there were still strong differences in the magnitude of the favorability.
View as a table:
There is a broad consensus of approval with the EU, with no country on the map being in the red. On average, residents choose to say the EU had a “positive impact” instead of a “negative impact” with a margin of +34 percentage points.
The magnitude of the net positive rating, however, varies greatly depending on where you live in Europe. The first thing that is very clear is that there is no geographical consistency.
There are a few countries that do align with what we know about the EU. Poland, for example, posts the highest approval of the EU, which makes sense as the country is the number one financial profiteer in the Union. The clashes and disputes between the Presidents of Poland and the EU, which center around the erosion of Poland’s independent justice system, don’t seem to weigh on the rating. A similar trend can be seen in Hungary, another country that is led by a President who is a frequent critic of the Union himself: Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s citizens view the EU favorably by a margin of 32% as Orbán’s government faces growing backlash from EU partners over its authoritarian practices. That discrepancy might put Orbán in a tough spot in the upcoming 2026 election in Hungary, where Péter Magyar is looking to unseat him.
The Far-Right’s Unpopular EU Position
In other countries, such as Germany or the Netherlands, the European Union seldom becomes a campaign topic, even as citizens in both countries have very favorable views of the Union. The one country where the rise of an anti-EU party somewhat coincides with low public opinion of the EU is the Czech Republic. Andrej Babiš, a vitriolic EU-critic, won the 2025 parliamentary election there and is poised to become the country’s prime minister while approval of the EU sits at +1%, the lowest value among all members.
France is another country with a surging far-right and a relatively low approval of the EU when compared to its peers. Taken at face value, however, the country’s positive, +7% approval of the EU can hardly be classified as anti-European sentiment. That, in fact, is something we can’t find in any of the 27 member states.
It seems evident that the European far-right parties have a problem that hasn’t been fully exploited by their political opponents. EU citizens love the EU. Yet many of them support far-right parties, likely because their anti-EU positions are rarely the center of the debate. Parties from the center and the left could capitalize on these issues and push the far-right’s unpopular anti-European positions into the spotlight. Voters might then realize how out of line the AFD, the PVV, or Rassemblement National are with their own high regard for the European Union.