It is tempting to use Europe’s crowded electoral calendar as a way of reading the runes about the continent’s future and, in particular, about the future of the European Union. The outcome of elections this month in countries at the opposite ends of the union, Poland and Portugal, does tell us something about the balance between pro-EU and anti-EU forces across the continent, which is that, marginally at least, the latter are becoming somewhat stronger. Inevitably, but incorrectly, this change is understood by some in Britain as relevant to the UK’s coming referendum. But Euroscepticism is a loose label for a lot of things, not a movement.

In Poland, a party more Eurosceptical than its predecessor will take power, either on its own if a final count gives it an absolute majority, or in partnership with a smaller party. In Portugal, a diminished centre-right coalition is trying to form a government but may well be displaced by a group of parties led by the Socialists but including two junior partners that have in the past advocated withdrawal from the union and from Nato, although they dropped these demands in order to work together to seek power.

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But, as we get more used to Euroscepticism – it has become to some degree the default condition of all members of the EU – these broad reckonings seem less important than they used to, for three main reasons. The first is that national politics often uses a pro- and anti-European vocabulary readily (and sometimes recklessly) to discuss issues that are essentially domestic. The second is that the lines between wanting to be out of Europe and wanting a different Europe are very blurred. The third is that Eurosceptics tend to grow less sceptical as they approach, and particularly when they take, power.

In the Polish election campaign, the EU in the formal sense was far from being the main issue, in spite of British coverage implying that it was, but one related to the position of Poland in the larger European and western family of economies was probably critical. Poland’s younger generation, who voted for the Law and Justice party in unprecedented numbers, see themselves as victims. While their elders coast along with stable pensions and communist-era housing, the young struggle to get decent jobs, or have to go abroad for work, and mortgages are hard to get and too expensive. Poland has the largest proportion in the EU of working people on precarious contracts, around 30%.

And yet this is in the country with the best growth record of any in Europe in the post-crash period. The obvious conclusion is that the happiness and the prospects of young people are being sacrificed so that the companies, both local and international, investing in the country can make bigger profits. The promises of the Law and Justice party to do something about this must have had a great deal to do with its success.

Young people may have been as important in Portugal’s election as they were in Poland’s, although in this case it is lack of jobs rather than precarious jobs that is the main question. Portugal has record unemployment and youth unemployment rates, with tens of thousands of its citizens emigrating to find work. That the lack of decent jobs or of any jobs at all for young people is important in elections is hardly a jaw-dropping surprise.

The problem, of which most European politicians are well aware, even if they avoid enunciating it, is that both national governments and the European institutions are not dealing effectively with the challenges our societies face. Renationalisation – dissolving or diluting the union – would leave even the stronger states less able to look after themselves in a tough world, but increased centralisation in the EU is a difficult option because member states are not ready to hand over more powers to Brussels – or, as some of them see it, to Germany – or to incur the wrath of their electorates by doing all the unpalatable things that Brussels decrees. The agonised effort to achieve some agreement and coherence over Middle Eastern migrants is proof enough of that.

Yet, in spite of leaders such as Slovenia’s Miro Cerar saying that unless Europe finds a solution to the migrant crisis “it is the end of the EU as such”, it is clear that an imperfect EU is better than none at all. It may be that electorates and politicians, “Eurosceptics” included, are at the point where they understand better than they did that the EU is a constraining and sometimes infuriating framework, but one without which the world would be even scarier than it is now.