Trust in the US security guarantee is waning
Most Europeans support increasing national defence spending and purchasing European-made weapons as part of the defence ramp-up, new data from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) shows.
The study by the Brussels-based think tank, released on Wednesday, found that most Europeans favour higher defence spending. Italians proved to be outliers, however, with more respondents opposing a larger defence budget.
The poll, conducted in May 2026, included more than 18,000 respondents from Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
European countries started massively increasing their military budgets following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and are set to spend even more over the next decade as NATO countries committed last year to spending 3.5% of GDP on core defence by 2035.
