GETTY The EU faces an uphill struggle to restore its popularity

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An excoriating set of polling data lifts the lid on massive public dissatisfaction with Brussels across the continent and demonstrates the monumental task the bloc faces to save itself from oblivion. The divide between how the haves and the have-nots view the Union is utterly cavernous, with just a third of ordinary working people saying it is a good thing compared to nearly three quarters of the political and economic elite. Eurocrats have been growing more and more confident that they have weathered the populist storm in recent months following election routs of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

But a damning survey by the respected Chatham House think tank, carried out across 10 EU countries, paints a starkly different picture of how ordinary Europeans see the project. It shows that, whilst other EU countries may not yet be ready to follow the UK out of the exit door, many of their citizens feel exactly the same anger and frustration towards Brussels as their British counterparts. Just 34 per cent of ordinary people asked by researchers said they had “benefitted” from the EU - a shockingly low number which should be cause for serious concern for eurocrats.

In contrast 71 per cent of what pollsters called the “elite” - establishment figures such as politicians, economists and journalists - thought the European project had been good for them. But perhaps most damningly of all for eurocrats an astonishing 54 per cent of respondents across 10 countries feel that their homeland was a better place to live 20 years ago than now. That figure includes more than half of Hungarians - whose country wasn’t even in the project two decades ago - and an astonishing 74 per cent of Italians who have suffered years of punishing austerity. Only in Spain, Britain and Poland do more than half of people believe life is better now than it was in 1997 - and even in those three countries the majority is slim.

Only 34% of the public feel they have benefited from the EU Chatham House survey

The extensive survey also shows how eurocrats’ attempts to foster a “European identity” through EU citizenship programmes has utterly failed, with most people still identifying by their country of birth. In all but one of the countries people said they were significantly more proud of their national identity than their “European” one despite decades of effort on the part of some euro elites to break down the former. The only silver lining for Brussels is that there is a “reservoir of support” amongst the European public for a project boosting cooperation and friendly relations between the continent’s countries. But it is clear from the data that the disconnect between the form eurocrats think this should take, through ever-closer political union, and what ordinary people want is cavernous. The Chatham House report notes: “The data reveal a continent split along three lines. First, there is a divide between elites and the public. “There is alignment between the two groups in their attitudes to, among other things, EU solidarity, EU democracy and a sense of European identity.”

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