A new poll shows that America’s popularity has taken a battering among Brits and Europeans, after Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. The US President has already caused quite a stir in the global arena with a number of controversial moves over the last month.
The Republican boss is eyeing a land grab for Greenland, a part of Denmark, telling a joint address of Congress on Tuesday that the US will get the Arctic island “one way or another”. Trump has also slapped tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and is threatening to do the same to both the UK and Europe. His pivot towards Russia and his very public spat with Ukraine’s President Zelensky last week has also caused international outrage.
All in all, Trump’s aggressive foreign policy appears to be denting America’s reputation among the publics of its traditional Western allies.
YouGov’s latest EuroTrack survey shows favourable attitudes towards the United States have fallen by between six and 28 percentage points across Europe, since Trump’s re-election.
Denmark recorded the biggest drop in positive views of the US, falling from 48% prior to the elections, to just 20% thereafter.
Sweden and Germany both saw a drop of 20%, while in France and the UK favourable opinions of the US fell by 16 and 12 percentage points respectively.
Only around a third of people in Germany (32%), France (34%) and the UK (37%) feel positive towards the US now.
Spain and Italy are the two European countries where people expressed the highest levels of support for Trump’s America.
43% of Spaniards and 42% of Italians said they still had a positive opinion of the US. However, this still represents fewer than half of the people there.
Commenting on the poll results, YouGov said: “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.”
They added: “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%.”
