Politics

Poll: The affordability crisis is disrupting politics in one country after another

Published

5 days ago

December 18, 2025

The affordability crisis that upended global politics last year continues to ripple across some of the world’s biggest democracies — punishing incumbents and undermining longstanding political alliances.

New international POLITICO polling shows the voter frustration with persistent financial strain remains a deeply potent force today. In five major economies, The Blue Light News Poll found ongoing cost-of-living pressures continue to reverberate through politics:

In the United States, where Donald Trump returned to power on a campaign of economic populism, nearly two-thirds of voters — 65 percent — say the cost of living in the country has gotten worse over the last year.
In the United Kingdom, where voters ousted the Conservative Party in 2024 after 14 years of rule, 77 percent say the cost of living has worsened.
In France, where President Emmanuel Macron is grappling with historically low favorability ratings, almost half of all adults — 45 percent — say their country is falling behind comparable economies.
In Germany, after prolonged infighting over the economy, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition collapsed last year. There, 78 percent of respondents say the cost of living has gotten worse over the last year.
And in Canada, a post-pandemic affordability crisis helped fuel a public backlash against then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government ahead of his resignation earlier this year. The Blue Light News Poll found that 60 percent of adults in the country say the cost of living is the worst they can remember it being.

The results, from Blue Light News and Public First’s first-ever joint international poll, illustrate the uphill battle many leaders face in trying to contain the intertwined economic and political unrest. Five years after the coronavirus pandemic upended the global economy — and as the world contends with competing conflicts and AI rapidly becoming a defining force — meaningful shares of respondents across the U.S., Canada, and Europe’s biggest economies of Germany, the United Kingdom and France view the cost of living as among the biggest issues facing the world right now.

But as leaders seek to address the affordability concerns, many say that their leaders could be doing a lot more to help on the cost of living, but are choosing not to.

That has left incumbent governments grappling with how to manage the rising economic dread — and control the resulting political backlash. It has also created an opportunity for opposition parties on economic messaging.

“For incumbents it’s very difficult to run on these platforms,” said Javier Carbonell, a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre. “Today, center-left and center-right parties are seen as incumbents, and as the ones who are to put the blame.”

Voters are pessimistic about the cost of living

There is a pervasive sense in the five countries that their economies are deteriorating.

In France, 82 percent of adults say the cost of living in the country has worsened over the last year, as do 78 percent of respondents in Germany; 77 percent of adults in the United Kingdom and 79 percent in Canada say the same.

A majority of people in all five countries go even further, saying the cost of living crisis has never been worse.

In a further sign of the trouble facing leaders, the poll results suggest many view affordability as a systemic problem more than a personal one. Majorities across the countries, for example, say the issue of affordability is the high cost of goods, not that they are not paid too little.

In the U.K., roughly two-thirds of adults say the country’s economy has deteriorated — greater than the 46 percent who say their own financial situation has worsened over the last year. That same pattern holds for France, Canada and Germany, suggesting the public holds broad concerns about the economy and affordability that go beyond their individual lives.

While the European Union’s economy is set to grow by 1.4 percent in 2025, the economy in Germany has weakened over the past two years, and is expected to stagnate this year. In France, a series of government policies aimed at addressing cost-of-living concerns have contributed to an exploding national debt, which currently stands at nearly $4 trillion USD.

In the United Kingdom, the results come against a backdrop of sluggish economic growth, with incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer struggling to convince voters that his center-left Labour Party can drive down the cost of living.

And in Canada, the country’s deep-seated anxiety is born out by federal inflation data. Statistics Canada reported this week that the consumer price index ticked up 2.2 percent in November compared to the same month in 2024 — nearly a bullseye on the central bank’s 2 percent target.

Negative economic views are shaping politics

Voters’ economic concerns are roiling politics.

In 2024, Trump ran a campaign on economic concerns without having to oversee the economy himself. That dynamic has shifted in recent months, with voters beginning to sour on his handling of the economy, underscoring the difficulty of convincing voters of economic progress amid stubborn cost-of-living concerns.

That feeling of falling behind was particularly acute among European respondents in the Blue Light News Poll, with nearly half of adults in Germany, France and the United Kingdom saying that their country is “generally falling behind other comparable economies.”

That pessimism has pushed many people out of the political process, Carbonell said, “because there’s no expectation that things are going to change.” For others, it’s fueling a search for political alternatives.

“There is this increasing demand for a very anti-system politics,” he said.

In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz made revamping the economy a central campaign promise. But since taking office, he has been preoccupied with geopolitical issues, including the ongoing trade war and the Russia-Ukraine war.

That has become a successful line of attack for Merz’s critics — among them the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now polling in first place. The party has accused Merz — whose approval ratings are at an all-time low — of not paying enough attention to the needs of the people in his own country, nicknaming him the “foreign policy chancellor.”

In France, the government is looking to roll back some of the policies it rolled out in response to cost-of-living concerns, but doing so could prove particularly unpopular with a population laser-focused on high costs. It could also fuel anti-establishment parties on the right and left, which have made the issue a central weapon against France’s crumbling political center.

David Coletto, a longtime pollster in Canada and CEO of the firm Abacus Data, has for years tracked affordability concerns — and found widespread concern among most survey respondents.

“This is not a marginal concern or a background anxiety,” he wrote of results from Blue Light News’s November poll. “It is a dominant lived experience that continues to shape how Canadians interpret government performance, leadership, and competing policy priorities, alongside concern about Donald Trump, trade, and global instability.”

Affordability messaging will be a central message in upcoming elections

Affordability will be a central feature of elections across the globe next year — with some of that messaging already underway. In the U.S., Democratic candidates from New York to Georgia focused much of their 2025 campaigns on lowering the costs of living, and both parties are planning to center the issue in the midterms.

“For now, the cost of living remains a warning light rather than a red light for the Carney government,” Coletto wrote. “But the intensity of feeling, combined with seasonal pressures and fragile household finances, means the issue is unlikely to fade quietly into the background.”

Starmer’s government — languishing in the polls and facing local elections in 2026 — has pivoted in recent weeks to a more explicit focus on affordability.

The U.K. government has also floated freezing train fares, lowering energy bills, and boosting the minimum wage in an attempt to solve the affordability crisis, but a record-high level of taxation confirmed at a government-wide budget last month risks blunting its economic message.

In Germany, the issue of affordability may gain new momentum when voters in five federal states head to the polls to elect new state parliaments next year. In Berlin, the far-left Left Party, for example, plans to take a playbook from the affordability-centered campaign of New York’s Zohran Mamdani as a model for the state elections in September.

With local elections also taking place across France next year, and a presidential election in 2027, these issues are likely to continue to take center stage, especially in the larger cities where pricing pressures have been particularly acute.

In Paris, the outgoing center-left administration has been praised for making the city greener and more pedestrian-friendly, but far more needs to be done on affordability, said David Belliard, a member of the outgoing administration and the Green Party’s candidate for mayor.

“We’ve spent a lot of time fighting against the end of the world,” Belliard said, “but maybe not enough helping people make it to the end of the month.”

Blue Light News’s Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed to this report from the United Kingdom, Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report from France, Nette Nöstlinger contributed to this report from Germany and Nick Taylor-Vaisey contributed to this report from Canada.

Politics

Poll: America’s allies say the US creates more problems than it solves

Published

2 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Blue Light Newsroom

Unreliable. Creating more problems than solving them. A negative force on the world stage. This is how large shares of America’s closest allies view the U.S., according to new polling, as President Donald Trump pursues a sweeping foreign policy overhaul.

Pluralities in Germany and France — and a majority of Canadians — say the U.S. is a negative force globally, according to new international POLITICO-Public First polling. Views are more mixed in the United Kingdom, but more than a third of respondents there share that dim assessment.

Near-majorities in all four countries also say the U.S. tends to create problems for other countries rather than solve them.

The findings offer a snapshot of how Trump’s reshaping of U.S. foreign policy — including through an expansive trade agenda, sharp rhetoric toward longtime allies and reoriented military posture — is resonating across some of Washington’s closest allies.

When asked whether the U.S. supports its allies around the world or challenges them, a majority of Canadians say the latter, as well as just under half of respondents in Germany and France. In the U.K., roughly 4 in 10 say the U.S. challenges, rather than supports, its allies, more than a third say it cannot be depended on in a crisis, nearly half say it creates problems for other countries, and 35 percent say the U.S. is a negative force overall.

Trump has blurred traditional lines of global alliances during his first year back in office, particularly in Canada and Europe. He called Europe a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people in a recent POLITICO interview and his sweeping National Security Strategyargued that the continent has lost its “national identities and self-confidence.”

By contrast, the strategy reserved less scathing language for Russia — even as U.S. allies in Europe gear up for what leaders have called a “hybrid war” with Moscow.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the administration’s approach when asked about European criticisms, saying the transatlantic alliance remains rooted in shared “civilizational” values. “I do think that at the core of these special relationships we have is the fact that we have shared history, shared values, shared civilizational principles that we should be unapologetic about,” Rubio said at a briefing last week.

But as Trump disrupts long-standing relationships, skepticism among allied leaders may be seeping into public sentiment, said Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

“Public opinion in democracies often reflects elite opinion,” he said. “What you’re probably seeing there is that you do have politicians in these countries expressing skepticism about the United States and about the Trump administration, and that’s being reflected in the public opinion polling.”

Leaders across Europe and Canada recalibrate under Trump’s foreign policy agenda

That dynamic is playing out across Europe and Canada, as leaders across the countries try to keep the increasingly strained relationships intact.

In Germany, wavering U.S. military support for Ukraine, questions about Washington’s commitment to NATO and Trump’s tariff war have added urgency for Chancellor Friedrich Merz to move beyond the country’s long-established limits on defense spending and economic policy. Weeks before taking office, Merz secured a historic spending overhaul that unlocked hundreds of billions of euros for defense and infrastructure investments after years of self-imposed austerity.

“Every foreign policy statement by Trump is followed closely, and often discussed in light of what it may mean for U.S. policy shifts regarding European security issues, such as commitment to NATO, future U.S. troop presence in Europe, and support for Ukraine,” said Dominik Tolksdorf, a transatlantic expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

In France, where skepticism toward the U.S. has long run deep, President Emmanuel Macron has pursued personal diplomacy with Trump while using the president’s unpredictability to bolster arguments for greater European strategic autonomy.

“Handing over one’s sovereignty to another power is a mistake — De Gaulle said nothing else,” one high-ranking French military officer, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told Blue Light News. Another defense official said Trump’s National Security Strategy had increased “awareness that something is not right.”

In the U.K., Trump remains polarizing, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer has largely avoided public confrontation. His priorities now include finalizing a U.K.-U.S. trade deal and coordinating a European response to Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine — without angering the White House, the delicate balance many allied leaders are trying to strike.

Canada, meanwhile, has seen the sharpest deterioration in relations, which have soured amid a punishing trade war and Trump’s intermittent rhetoric on annexation.

Flavio Volpe, the president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, described the economic disruption linked to Trump’s trade moves. “People lost their jobs — ones they worked their entire lives — and billions of dollars in Canadian capital evaporated in an unexplainable turn away from the bankable post-Cold War balance of power by the White House,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Democrats remain skeptical of the U.S. on the world stage

Overall, Americans still view their country more favorably than their allies do. Nearly half — 49 percent — say the U.S. supports its allies around the world. A majority, 52 percent, say it can be depended on in a crisis, and 51 percent say the U.S. is a positive force globally.

But Democrats — who have displayed deeply pessimistic views about their country since Trump’s return to office — hold far more negative views.

Almost half of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris last year — 47 percent — also say the U.S. is a negative force in the world overall, compared with just 13 percent of Trump voters. Three in four Trump voters say the U.S. is a positive force in the world.

Many Democrats also don’t just express skepticism about the U.S., but view other countries and international blocs as stronger models: 58 percent of Harris voters say the European Union is a positive force in the world, and nearly two-thirds — 64 percent — say the same about Canada, greater than the shares who say the same about the U.S.

“This tracks with our other research on the rapid change of perceptions of the U.S. over the last year,” said Seb Wride, head of polling at Public First. “Americans themselves are not blind to it.”

Prior to the 2024 election, strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans — 71 percent and 69 percent — said the U.S. was a positive force in the world over the course of its entire history, Public First polling from October of last year found.

Exactly one year later, Democrats have sharply changed their views, with 77 percent of Trump voters still saying the U.S. is positive, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats.

“That’s around 1 in 8 Democrats changing their views on the role the U.S. has played in its entire history, in just one year,” said Wride.

Voters who backed Trump last November overwhelmingly view the U.S. in a positive light, but subtle differences emerge within his coalition. Eighty-one percent of self-identifying MAGA Trump voters say the U.S. is a positive force in the world overall, compared with 71 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters. Still, 17 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters say the opposite, that the U.S. is a negative force.

Blue Light News’s Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed reporting from the United Kingdom, Victor Goury-Laffont and Laura Kayali contributed from France, Nette Nöstlinger contributed from Germany and Nick Taylor-Vaisey contributed from Canada. Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing also contributed.