A strange thing was measured in Romania – Could this be behind it?

While trust in the European Union has mostly increased in other member states, trust in the European Union has fallen significantly in Romania in recent years – pointed out the Transylvanian news portal Krónika.ro, which presented the data on Romania from the European Parliament’s (EP) latest ninth Eurobarometer survey on Sunday.

Only 46 percent of the Romanian population still considers Romania’s membership of the European Union to be a good thing, compared to the European average of 62 percent.

In 2015, the proportion of Romanian residents who think EU membership is a good thing was even higher, at 68 percent, compared to the EU average of 54 percent at the time. The turning point in the Romanian population’s trust in the EU was the coronavirus pandemic, when Brussels introduced strict travel rules dependent on vaccinations, the Transylvanian newspaper explained.

The difference between the Romanian and the EU average is already smaller in the answers to the question about the benefits of EU membership.

66 percent of those surveyed answered that Romania benefited from being a member of the EU, while 72 percent of citizens at the EU level believed that “all in all, EU membership benefits their country.”

In terms of trust in the European Parliament, Romania (52 percent) remained closer to the European average (54 percent). Trust in national parliaments is also quite low at the European level (34 percent), but only 29 percent of the Romanian population trusts them.

Not the pandemic, but the discourse about the pandemic contributed to a large extent to the decline of trust in the EU. The restriction, anti-science and anti-vaccination discourse. A discourse that automatically became a discourse against the European Union, which tried to regulate, to find solutions

– Krónika quoted political scientist Cristian Pirvulescu, who evaluated the Romanian data series in a statement to RFI radio.

After the pandemic, the war in Ukraine has transformed into the same anti-European discourse that takes place on the Internet and is not effectively countered. However, the phenomenon was already visible 10 years ago and is certainly part of the hybrid war that Russia and other states are waging against the European Union and democracy.

– said Pirvulescu.

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