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Citizens from six EU member states took part in a pool concerning the European future: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. The analytical report is concentrated -among other things- on public attitudes towards vital issues about most pressing issues concerning the future of European integration; it was organised and published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and European Cultural Foundation (ECF).
Background
The cooperative ECFR-ECF report – called “Future nostalgia: Europe’s unfinished song” – has surveyed public opinion concerning the EU institutions’ activities and their attitude to present European challenges. Thus, it features outcomes from about half of European countries through opinion polling, interviews and desk-based research. It is part of an annual collaboration between ECFR and ECF to track and examine public opinion of the EU institutions and citizens’ views concerning the European future. The publication draws on about six thousand AI-moderated interviews conducted by a digital market research platform focused on AI-moderated voice interviews. The interviews were conducted during April-May 2026 among six European countries.
The notion of the “nostalgic idea” in the title comes from one of the EU leaders: in the last year State of the Union Address, SOTU-2025, the Commission President said that “there was simply no room or time for nostalgia: the so-called battle-lines for a new world order are based on power are being drawn right now. So, Europe must fight for its place in a world in which many major powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe. A world of imperial ambitions and imperial wars. A world in which dependencies are ruthlessly weaponised. And it is for all of these reasons that a new Europe must emerge”.
Source and citation from: State of the Union Address-2025, in: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/714d256c-a4fe-4d54-8fd1-c85fca571152_en?filename=State-of-the-Union-2025-Multilingual-speech.pdf
Some real policy’s issues
The report’s author, Pawel Zerka is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations; he is a lead analyst on public opinion dealing with the organisations’ polling and data research on foreign affairs. He calls the approach “practical politics with a horizon”, noting that the EU “needs practical politics capable of reproducing future nostalgia”. In this, he refers to the proponents of the European integration based on “creating expectations and turning some of their most ambitious plans into reality”. After decades of the European fruitful integration, he acknowledges, “the direction seems reversed”, as “the future increasingly appears to be something threatening”.
Among the main threats are some so-called existential, like military conflicts and climate, as well as “less immediately perceptible”, such as European digital technology’s decline and the so-called “economic slow agony”. Other threats, like demographic ageing (as “more generational”) and “civilizational replacement”, the author based on conspiracy theories, which somehow “provoke anxiety among parts of European population”.
However, telling people to “dream big” cannot overcome some elements of concerns for the EU’s the future; as soon as progressive EU leaders should govern present regional development for “a better future imaginable”, notes Zerka, the so-called future nostalgia “describes a lost capacity that European politics”. And in the “recovery process” (rather than a “backward-looking politics” represent the way national leaders’ politico-economic response.
Important, that as the EU is becoming “more domesticated”, notes Zerka, some issues -like migration – citizens regard as national and personal are increasingly becoming debates about “Europe” itself.
So far this has often worked to pro-Europeans’ disadvantage because Europe becomes implicated in people’s grievances; the EU becomes associated with the costs and constraints of policies that touch their everyday lives.
The author suggests that the EU leaders “need presently to make European action a part of a practical account of how they intend to improve people’s lives”. Many states’ leaders are, actually, find it difficult “to tell this side of the story”, leaving European critics freely to define European integration process primarily through “the costs, constraints and risks”. The author also predicts that such an approach would provide Eurosceptics with the opportunity “to sell the illusion that the future would be so much easier with less integration”.
Source and citations from: Zerka P. https://ecfr.eu/special/future-nostalgia-europes-unfinished-song/
Main report findings
Among top-line findings from ECFR and ECF’s 2026 ‘European Sentiment Compass’, the author mentions the following:
= Only about 12% of respondents describe European current situation in terms of “awakening and renewal”; and about 70 percent approach the issue as a “general deterioration or loss of normality”. The latter position is most pronounced among citizens in France, Germany and Italy.
= There is a crisis of confidence in the EU leadership and its ability to deliver: hence, 74% of citizens are concerned about the EU’s handling of challenges facing the continent.
= There are presently two leading challenges facing European Union – war and security (43%), followed by economic pressures (33%).
= European “slowness” is one of the main reasons why the future promised by political leaders is so hard for respondents to believe. Almost a third (32%) of those interviewed mentioned “European slowness” in their responses, including 39% of those “uncertain”; this concern emerged particularly strongly in the Netherlands (43%) and Germany (41%).
= European hypocrisy and inability “to stand its ground” when confronted by powerful actors are also recurring themes, mentioned by almost a third (30%) of all respondents.
More info concerning the EU future issues in “Modern facets in European future” seen in – https://www.integrin.dk/2023/10/11/modern-facets-in-european-future
And, additionally, in: https://www.integrin.dk/2024/07/11/european-beautiful-future-facing-complex-global-challenges
Report’s digital assistance
The taxonomy of the four polling segments – positive, negative, uncertain and the disconnected- has been designed by the report’s author based on the analysis of the data and interviews. Each interview was allocated to one of the four segments using AI-assisted coding to help manage the large volume of interviews.
The research team provided a large language model (LLM) with detailed definitions of the four groups; then, acting as a digital research assistant, the model read through each interview, evaluated the respondent’s view of European future, and assigned answers to each segment. Acting as a digital research assistant, LLM went through each interview, evaluated the respondents’ views and provided for the final assignment.