The State of the European Union. The European Parliament faces its most important elections yet

129 Introduction Since Spain’s entry in 1985, Spaniards’ opinion of the European Union (EU) has been generally positive and people have felt that membership in the Union is very beneficial for their country. Studies conducted over time have shown that in comparison to wavering public opinion in other EU States, Europeanist sentiment has consist- ently run high in Spain and Euroscepticism has never managed to gain a substantial foothold there. Spanish citizens’ longstanding support for the Union nevertheless flagged in the wake of the recent economic crisis and its social conse- quences. Sucessive Eurobarometer surveys indi- cate that Spaniards’ feelings of attachment to the EU, their perception of the Union and their trust in EU institutions deteriorated in the wake of 2008 and only began to recuperate in 2014. Given the plunge in Europeanist sentiment that occurred during the toughest years of the crisis, it is well worth asking how Spaniards rate the EU’s efforts to protect EU citizens from the negative consequences of the Great Recession. We have attempted to answer this question by means of A Europe that protects Spaniards , a study conducted by the research firm 40dB commissioned by Fundación Alternatives that examines the role Spaniards believe the EU should play in protecting the welfare and safety of European citizens. The findings reported here were based on the responses of 1,502 Spanish citizens above the age of eighteen to a four- teen-question online survey conducted between the fifth and twelfth of September 2018. Data collected during this process was weighed ac- cording to gender, age, socio-economic level, size of residence and autonomous community. Findings regarding respondents’ perceptions of EU’s role in protecting Spanish citizens from the impact of the crisis provide a clear, if sober- ing, picture: only 16.5% qualified the Union’s performance as being good or very good, 47.8% gave it a passing grade and 28.7% believed it had done a poor or very poor job ( Chart 1 ). The study nevertheless revealed that despite their criticism of the EU’s performance in this particu- lar instance, Spaniards are generally in favour of transferring additional competences to the EU level, the creation of more supranational organ- isms and the standardisation of rights to facili- tate deeper European integration. A Europe that protects Spaniards Pablo Arnaldos