Economy 22 December 2022, 8:26am

Warning signs: support for EU membership plummets among Hungarians

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The Hungarians' outlook on the future has not been as negative as it is now for many years - at least this is the conclusion of a Medián survey commissioned by HVG.

By mid-December, a two-thirds majority felt that things were going wrong in the country. In the spring, when the Russian-Ukrainian war was already under way, 51% of those who thought the direction was good were still in the majority, HVG's article reveals.

Meanwhile, disapproval of sanctions against Russia has increased significantly among Hungarians. 26% of respondents said that they would support sanctions against Russia, the aggressor, even if it meant that "Hungary's economic development would slow down and it would become more difficult to make a living". In May, this figure was 35%.

A very instructive result of the survey - taken between 9 and 15 December - is that according to Medián's research,

support for Hungary's EU membership has dropped by ten percentage points in recent months:

among voters of the governing party, only 64% support Hungarian EU membership, down from 83% in May, while among opposition voters there is also a noticeable lack of confidence, with a 5 percentage point drop.

The last few months have certainly been instrumental in changing the perception of EU membership, with the Hungarian government, for example, launching a major communication campaign against the EU's unified sanctions against Russia, and we have gone our separate ways on several EU cases, which the government defended by severely criticising the EU institutions and their functioning. The sharp antagonism between the European Commission and the Hungarian government, and the escalation of this antagonism in the area of EU funds, has certainly not helped the perception of the issue either.