Trust in EU?

T here comes a moment with almost all statistics when they are hard to believe. Yesterday's Spanish unemployment figures were in that category -- 27.2 percent of the population without work -- 6.2 million people -- and within those figures a mind-boggling 57 percent of the country's 16-24 year-olds. As it happened, however, these figures coincided with the result of opinion polls conducted in the six biggest European Union countries to try to ascertain attitudes to the EU's role in the financial crisis of the past five years. In Spain, once one of the most enthusiastic of the second and third phases of membership, a staggering 72 per cent of those questioned said that they now “tend not to trust the EU” while only 20 per cent said they tend to retain their trust in it as a positive force. Five years ago trust in the EU in Spain was 65 percent.

It is, of course, difficult to separate national and cross-EU responsibility for the dire economic situation now being experienced in Spain and most other EU countries.

But if the poll is accurate -- and the figures are similar elsewhere except for Germany where trust in the EU still commands more than half -- there has been a serious loss of belief in the EU as a source of strength in a crisis, indeed even that it may be part of the problem.