Attitudes in Denmark in particular have become more negative
With Donald Trump re-elected to the White House, the US president has been causing concern across Europe with his threats to put tariffs on a number of countries, suggestions that he could seize Greenland, and his willingness to negotiate with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine.
YouGov’s latest EuroTrack survey shows that favourable attitudes towards the United States in several Western European countries have slumped since President Trump’s election.
Comparing our latest quarterly data with the last poll prior to Donald Trump’s re-election, favourable attitudes towards the United States have fallen by between six and 28 percentage points.
Opinion towards the US is least positive in Denmark, at 20%, with fellow Scandinavians in Sweden coming next on 29%. Only around a third of people in Germany (32%), France (34%) and the UK (37%) have a favourable view of the US now. Italians and Spaniards are the most likely to have a favourable view, although this still represents fewer than half of people there feeling this way, at 42% and 43% respectively.
In Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Italy, these are the lowest figures for USA favourability since we began tracking this question.*
Favourable opinion of the US appears to have fallen both as a fact of Trump’s re-election (dropping 3-11 points between the last poll prior to the election and our November poll, by which point Trump had been elected but not yet taken office), and again subsequently as a result of his first actions as president.
This particularly appears to be the case in Denmark, which saw a 20pt drop in positive sentiment towards the US in the most recent poll, almost certainly in connection with Trump’s suggestions in January that he may seize the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland.
More than half of people in Britain (53%), Germany (56%), Sweden (63%) and Denmark (74%) now have an unfavourable opinion of the USA. Italy proves to be the only country in which the number of people with a negative view of the US do not outnumber those with a positive view – but even here Italians are divided 42%-42%.
How does this compare to Trump’s first term?
Favourable opinions of the USA also decreased at the start of Donald Trump’s first term, although we can only measure the drop between the post-election and post-inauguration periods. Our tracker data likewise shows that European attitudes towards the US saw considerable improvement after the election of Joe Biden in November 2020.
* Tracking began in November 2016 (after Trump’s 2016 election victory) in Great Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and from August 2021 in Spain and Italy.
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