23 October 2017

EUROPP: Survey evidence: Europeans support the EU’s hard line in the Brexit negotiations

Drawing on recent survey evidence, Stefanie Walter reflects on the Brexit process through EU-27 eyes, and concludes that by and large Europeans support the EU’s negotiating strategy.

[...] This data shows that Brexit is an issue that a majority of Europeans care about: 46 per cent of the Europeans surveyed said that they followed Brexit a little, and 18 per cent expressed a strong interest in Brexit (compared with 42 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, in the UK). To the extent that domestic public opinion constrains the negotiation space of the EU-27 governments, it is thus worthwhile to examine what EU-27 citizens think about Brexit. [...]

Does the EU public support the hard negotiating stance pursued by the EU in the Brexit negotiations?

Overall, the European public seems to agree with the uncompromising line of the European Commission on Brexit. A plurality of respondents (42 per cent) favour a somewhat or very hard line. This means that they think the EU should insist that the UK pay a large “exit bill” to compensate for the costs of Brexit, guarantee special rights for EU citizens living in the UK, and should not give the UK privileged access to the European single market. The preference for a hard stance increases the more interested respondents are in Brexit. Among those who follow Brexit a lot, almost two-thirds (62 per cent) support a hard line. In contrast, only 12 per cent of respondents think that the EU should approach the exit negotiations with the UK with a soft line, defined as accepting a small “exit bill,” limits on the rights of EU citizens currently living in the UK, and privileged access for the UK to the European single market.

Despite some differences across countries, the support for a hard negotiating position is also strong when we look at individual countries.[...]

These findings suggest the current EU negotiating strategy pursued by Michel Barnier is based on a broad consensus among the EU public. From this perspective, it is not surprising that British attempts to bypass the EU institutions by appealing directly to EU leaders have failed, or that Brexit is not a highly contested issue in the remaining part of the EU.

How do EU citizens evaluate the effects of Brexit on the UK, the EU, and their own country?

[...]First, many Europeans do not think that Brexit will bring significant changes over the next five years, especially not outside the UK. Less than 20 per cent of respondents think that Brexit will make the UK, the EU, or their own country much worse or much better off.

Second, many Europeans are oblivious to their own country’s vulnerability to Brexit: 44 per cent think that Brexit will neither benefit, nor hurt their country, and this rate is the same among those with a strong interest in Brexit. This suggests that public opinion on Brexit could still shift quite a bit as the effects of Brexit become clearer to voters. Finally, to the extent that they do expect Brexit to have an effect, more people see these effects as negative for everyone involved. Nonetheless, a significant number of respondents also see upsides to Brexit, notably for the UK itself.

Yet this also masks considerable differences among the EU member states. Figure 4 shows that in some countries, such as Poland and Germany, the public is quite aware of the possible negative consequences and opportunities of Brexit for their own country. In other countries, such as France, the opinion that Brexit will not have much effect on the country’s future dominates.

To what extent do spillover effects exist between the Brexit negotiations and exit preferences in other member states?

Voters’ expectations about the effects of Brexit matter for the Brexit negotiations because they widen or constrain policymakers’ room for manoeuvre. But they also matter because these expectations (and eventually, the actual trajectory) are likely to feed back into their own assessments about the viability of leaving the EU.

In the negotiations with the UK, the EU-27 governments, therefore, face an “accommodation dilemma“. In principle, as many Leavers rightly emphasise, the EU-27 have strong incentives to grant the UK continued access to the EU’s single market in order to minimise the disruptions of Brexit at home. Yet if this accommodation of the Brexit-vote creates incentives for other countries to leave as well, such a response might put the entire European project at risk in the long run. After all, a sizeable proportion of Europeans (28 per cent in my data) say that they would probably or definitely vote to leave the EU if their own country were to hold an EU-exit referendum. The rationale for the current hard, non-accommodation strategy vis-à-vis the UK is thus rooted in the hope that such a hard line will discourage further efforts at disintegration. But is this hope warranted?

[...] Because this relationship is most pronounced among those with a negative or neutral opinion of the EU, this suggests that the accommodation dilemma is real. A hard Brexit will hurt the member states. But the remaining EU-27 governments are also right to worry that allowing the UK to have its cake and eat it, too, and to prosper, as a result, risks a profound destabilisation of the EU. Public opinion on Brexit thus matters – but citizens in the remaining member states matter as much for the Brexit negotiations as the British public.

Full survey on EUROPP

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