Support for leaving the EU has dropped significantly, and sometimes dramatically, in member states across the bloc in the wake of the UK’s Brexit referendum, according to data from a major pan-European survey.
The European Social Survey (ESS), led by City, University of London and conducted in 30 European nations every two years since 2001, found respondents were less likely to vote leave in every EU member state for which data was available.
The largest decline in leave support was in Finland, where 28.6% of respondents who declared which way they would vote in a Brexit-style referendum answered leave in 2016-2017, but only 15.4% did in 2020-2022 – a fall of 13.2 percentage points.
Similarly stark declines between 2016 and 2022 were recorded in the Netherlands (a drop of 9.5 percentage points), Portugal (9.1), Austria (8.5) and France (8.3), with smaller but still statistically significant falls in Hungary (5.8), Spain and Sweden (4.6), and Germany (2.6).
Support for leave in the survey’s most recent round was highest in the Czech Republic (29.2%), Italy (20.1%) and Sweden (19.3%), but even in those countries it had declined by 4.5 percentage points, 9.1 points and 4.6 points respectively since 2026-2017, the survey showed. Leave was least popular in Spain (4.7%).
The period covers Britain’s long and fraught negotiations to leave the EU, but also the country’s ensuing political turmoil – five prime ministers in six years – and its current social and economic woes, all of which have been heavily reported on the continent and are widely interpreted as being caused at least partly by Brexit.
They also coincide with the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which experts suggest have prompted many EU citizens to view membership more favourably, and decisions by many anti-EU parties, including in France and Italy, to abandon Frexit or Italexit policies in favour of reforming the EU from within.
Mathieu Gallard, research director of the leading French polling firm Ipsos, which regularly conducts surveys of European opinion, said the ESS numbers reflected a “veritable collapse” in support for leaving the EU in several countries.
Gallard said the fall in support for a leave vote most likely stemmed from “a cumulative effect combining the EU’s attitude towards the various crises of recent years, the radical right’s moderation on the subject [of leaving the EU], and the many vicissitudes of Brexit”.
The ESS survey also found that respondents’ emotional attachment to Europe had increased between 2016 and 2022 in most member states. Asked to rate how attached they felt to the bloc on a scale of zero to 10, 54.9% of Portuguese respondents gave responses between seven and 10 in 2020-2022, against 41.5% in 2016-2017.
