The Draghi report pointed out that the European Union has been facing serious competitiveness challenges for years, and that these difficulties have been exacerbated by the energy crisis, the Russia-Ukraine war and the resulting trade conflicts. EU Member States identified tackling this problem as the most important task facing the Community in 2024 in Budapest, and called on the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, to urgently develop proposals that could help pull the EU out of the hole.
A year and a half has passed since the Budapest agreement, but the situation has not changed. Brussels’ proposals – such as REPowerEU, which calls for a ban on Russian energy sources – have not improved the EU’s position, and European citizens are aware of this. According to the results of Századvég’s Project Europe survey, 68% of EU residents believe that the Community’s global competitiveness is declining. Their proportion is exactly the same as it was in the previous data collection in 2025.
The economic slump in the European Union is becoming increasingly apparent in the everyday lives of households: one-third of EU citizens are struggling to make ends meet, with the proportion reaching 30% in two-thirds of Member States.
Hungarians, Lithuanians, Dutch, and Portuguese say they are the least affected by livelihood challenges (all 22%) while Greeks (55%), Slovaks (45%) and Latvians, Finns, and Romanians (all 42%) are in the most difficult situation.
In the first half of 2016, the Századvég Foundation conducted a public opinion survey covering the 28 Member States of the European Union to examine the views of European citizens on the issues that most affect the future of the Union. The Project28 public opinion survey was the most extensive ever, with a unique survey of 1,000 randomly selected adults per country, totalling 28,000. The main objectives of the survey were to gauge public sense of prosperity and to explore public attitudes towards the performance of the European Union, the migration crisis and rising terrorism. Following the surveys of 2017, 2018 and 2019, the Századvég Foundation, on behalf of the Hungarian government, continued the research since 2020 under the name Project Europe, which continued to reflect on the most dominant topics in European political and public discourse. The latest data collection took place between 17 November 2025 and 16 January 2026, involving 30,000 respondents in 30 European countries, using the CATI method.
