Trust in the EU falls to historic lows.

My translation for Daidaidai Milan of Ian Traynor's article that appeared on The Guardian on April 24, 2013.

Citizens' trust in the European Union has fallen to historic lows in the six main EU countries, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the worst crisis the Union has ever known, as shown new data.

After the financial, monetary and debt crises, spending and budget cuts, bailouts of poor nations by rich ones and reduction of sovereign powers to the political practices of international technocrats, Euroscepticism is on the rise so strongly that it risks fueling anti-EU populist policies and undermine European leaders' efforts to halt the collapse in support for their project.

Data from Eurobarometer, the EU's polling institute, analyzed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think tank, indicate a steep decline in trust in the European Union in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy which have been historically very favorable to Europe.

The six countries examined – Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Poland – are the largest in the EU, and represent, combined, more than two in three EU citizens; approximately 350 million inhabitants out of 500.

The findings, published exclusively in the Guardian in Britain and in collaboration with the other major newspapers of the other five countries, represent a nightmare for European leaders, both in the rich north and in the battered south to be saved, suggesting a crisis much bigger than the politics and democratic legitimacy.

“The damage is so profound that it doesn't matter whether you come from a creditor country, a debtor country, an aspiring member or the United Kingdom: everyone is disheartened,” said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. “Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is being handled.”

European leaders are aware of the problem, but completely disagree on what to do about it; and they have yet to come up with any coherent policy proposals to resolve the contradiction between bringing together economic and fiscal powers and the democratic mandate needed to support such radical political changes.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told Tuesdaythis week that the European "dream" is under threat from a "resurrection of populism and nationalism" across the EU. “At a time when so many Europeans are facing unemployment, uncertainty and growing inequality, a kind of 'European fatigue' has emerged alongside a lack of understanding. Who does what, who decides what, who controls who and what? And where are we going?”

The most dramatic fall in confidence in the EU was recorded in Spain, where the collapse of the banking and real estate markets, the eurozone bailout and rampant unemployment combined to produce the 72% of citizens "who tend not to have confidence” in the EU, with only 20% “tending to have confidence”.

Comparing the confidence and distrust data in the EU at the end of last year with the levels of 2007, before the financial crisis, we note a precipitous fall in support for the EU which has fallen to the levels that existed before in Great Britain, but which were much rarer on the continent.

In Spain, trust in the European Union fell from 65% to 20% in five years, while distrust rose to 72% from 23%.

In five of the six countries, including Great Britain, mistrust prevails over trust by significant margins, while in 2007 – with the exception of the United Kingdom – it was the other way around.

Five years ago, 56% Germans “tended to trust” the EU, while 59% now “tended to distrust”. In France, distrust increased from 41% to 56%. In Italy, where public trust in Europe has traditionally been higher than that of the national political class, distrust in the EU has almost doubled, from 28% to 53%.

Even in Poland, which enthusiastically joined the EU less than a decade ago and is the single largest beneficiary of tens of billions of euros in transfers from Brussels, the estimate has plummeted from 68% to 48%, although it remains the only country under examination in which trust in the union is higher than distrust.

In Britain, where Eurobarometer regularly finds greater Euroscepticism, mistrust rose from 49% to 69%, the highest level, with the exception of the extraordinary turnaround in Spain.

A different, more detailed study published this week into the impact of the currency and debt crisis and the austerity policies that followed it also found huge drops across the EU in trust in democracy and national political ruling classes.

The study for the Cabinet Office of the European Social Survey, which links university researchers across the EU, found that rising unemployment, anxiety and insecurity have eroded faith in politics.

“Global levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy [has declined] across much of Europe, but at a cross-country rate. It is significant in Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Finland, particularly notable in France, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, and has reached truly alarming proportions in the case of Greece,” it reads.

The financial crisis "has not only eroded the objective economic conditions of many citizens, but has also created widespread anxiety towards the country's future, even among those who have not directly experienced the difficulties".

Faced with this erosion of political trust and the beatings that traditional politics are taking from new populists like Beppe Grillo's Five Star movement in Italy, politicians seem increasingly at a loss.

On Monday, Barroso said that the austerity policies applied, especially under pressure from Berlin, have reached the "limits of political and social acceptance" and are "unsustainable" in their current form. Last Tuesday, however, the Brussels Commission tried to go against his observations.

Within the eurozone, the fundamental response to the crisis, apart from bailouts, has been to undertake a systematic handover of budgetary and fiscal powers by national governments and parliaments to Brussels, in the same way that has been done with those countries bailed out with oversight by a “troika” of technocrats and economists from the Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These are “federalist” steps in the long process of integration of the eurozone which could see itself transformed from a monetary union into a political union.

“The EU has reached home and is here to stay as a watchdog of budgets, labor markets, pensions, etc. This is unprecedented, and risky,” Torreblanca said. “If it is not stabilised, it will feed the vicious circle between anti-EU populism and technocracy that we are currently seeing operating.”

Barroso forcefully argued in two speeches this week that federalism is the only answer to Europe's financial crisis and its confidence. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seeking to brush aside widespread fears of a new German "hegemony" in Europe and the eurozone, also said governments must give up much more power to Brussels.

“We have not yet found the answer to the question of whether we are really now ready to unite under common economic parameters within the single currency area,” he said in a debate in Berlin with the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. “If we want to have a common currency, a common Europe, we must be ready to give up our hard-won habits… This means we must be ready to accept that, in the end, Europe has the final say in certain things. Otherwise we cannot continue to build this Europe… In a certain sense, we have to leap beyond our shadows. I'm ready for this."

But Tusk showed unusually strong concerns that German prescriptions could bring growing nationalism and populism across the EU in a backlash that is already at a worrying point.

“We cannot escape this dilemma: how to ensure that a new model of sovereignty that limits national sovereignty in the EU is not dominated by large countries like Germany, for example,” he said pointedly. “Below the surface, this fear will be everywhere: in Warsaw, in Athens, in Stockholm. It will be everywhere without exception."

Aart de Geus, head of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German think tank, also warned that the path towards ceding major national powers to Brussels would be counterproductive. “Public support for the EU has been declining since 2007. So it is risky to move towards federalism as it can cause a violent reaction and unleash more populism.”