Analyst: People Non-committal about EU Are Easily Swayed

Bratislava, February 26 (TASR) – A total of 45 percent of Slovaks have a neutral view of the European Union, according to the results of a Eurobarometer 86 survey announced by head of the European Commission Representation in Slovakia Dusan Chrenek.

“These people are highly vulnerable in their attitudes towards the EU, and it wouldn’t take much work to prompt them to vote for leaving the EU if such a referendum were organised,” said Pavol Babos, an analyst with the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava.

Several surveys that were carried out last year and sought public perceptions on the EU, NATO and foreign policy as such revealed that people who exhibited “lukewarm” support for the EU were easily made uncertain by the arguments of EU detractors, he said.

Babos was also sceptical about whether Slovak politicians are doing enough work in favour of the EU. “Instead, they tend to turn the EU and Brussels into bogeymen. Their statements often involve making Brussels out to be something abstract, distant and negative, while we at home are the good ones,” he said.

Babos went on to call such a division “artificial”, given that the EU’s single most important institution is the Council of the EU, which is made up of representatives of individual states. “This is to say that the EU’s most important institution, the infamous Brussels, is the states themselves, or us,” he stressed.