Same Europeanism, another Europe | Spain
The Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January this year It has not produced significant variations in the perceptions of Spanish citizenship before the European Union, although it has been able, together with other factors, a reorganization of priorities. Spain, therefore, has not become more Europeanist, nor less, but claims a more autonomous and economically sovereign Europe. This would be, in broad strokes, one of the main conclusions of the May 40DB barometer. For the country and chain being.
In general terms, Spanish society feels European and Europeanist without relevant changes with respect to the survey conducted a year ago, just before the last European elections. On a scale of 0 to 10 from less to more European feeling, the average is 7.4. In this same sense, only two out of ten interviewees would like the EU to have fewer competences than now or dissolve. In addition, citizens associate the European Union to a greater extent to positive than negative concepts: it is more identified with the words democracy and social protection than with international bureaucracy or weakness. The Spanish Europeanism, therefore, resists, and does so despite the extreme right (a quarter of its voters would want the European Union to disappear).
Spanish public opinion, stable in its identification with Europe, has rearranged, however, its priorities, now claiming more strategic vision and, specifically, greater economic autonomy. Almost eight out of ten respondents believe that, If after the three -month truce declared, the United States will resume the tariff warthe EU should encourage internal production to reduce its economic dependence. This opinion is widely shared, without exception, by electorates of all political parties.
The survey leaves other data that point in the same direction. Thus, society wants the European Union to invest above all in technology and industry in order to depend less on other countries (tied with housing as a priority). This is today the main investment priority, ahead of border control to avoid irregular immigration, of renewable energy efforts to combat the climatic crisis or the defense and security policy itself, all of them important issues, but behind economic and technological independence. The defense of a European economic sovereignty does not understand ideologies: in this, there is consensus among the electorates of all political forces.
In sum, global conflicts, the possible tariff war, which adds to the traditional antieuropeism of Donald Trump (remember his phrase “The EU was created to ‘fuck’ the United States”), they have not pushed Spanish society towards a more intense Europeanism, but towards a more sovereign positioning: a Europe is able to be autonomous in front of the great economic powers. It is, in short, to defend the European model at all costs, even if it implies another Europe, further away from its traditional commitment to globalization and interdependence.
