The European Commission reaches 52% confidence in May 2025, its highest level since 2007. National parliaments and governments plateau at 36-37%, and political parties fall below 33% in all surveyed countries. TRUEDEM conducted research in 24 member states on institutional trust, with results varying by country.
The essentials
- Confidence in the European Commission reaches 52% in 2025, compared to 36-37% for national parliaments and governments (Eurobarometer May 2025).
- TRUEDEM makes available historical trends currently covering the period 1980-2023 and a separate 2025 survey; it does not publish, in this resource, a 2023-2025 evolution of two points.
- The absence of direct election of the Commission does not alone allow concluding that the Commission makes political commitments, notably in its annual work program, without these necessarily being equivalent to direct electoral promises, nor that its credibility remains intact.
- A central issue for European liberal democracy is the contrast between levels of confidence in elected officials and in unelected institutions.
- Two trajectories are open until 2030-2035: representative detachment or reconquest through transparency of commitments.
The Commission holds, governments run out of steam
In May 2025, the Eurobarometer records 52% confidence in the European Commission. The figure marks a turning point: this level had not been seen since 2007, before the financial crisis and the ten years of mistrust that followed. In the same survey, national parliaments obtain 37% and governments 36%. Political parties are the least trusted institutions in the 24 countries and rarely exceed one-third confidence.
The gap is not new. In 2007, the Commission was at 52%, compared to 36% in spring 2025 and 33% in autumn 2025 for the national government. The 2025 gap is marked, but its magnitude is not unprecedented in the Eurobarometer series. TRUEDEM’s original survey data were collected in 24 countries in 2025; the project ran from 2023 to 2025. They record significant variations in confidence across countries.
The Commission does a lot of things. It regulates markets, negotiates trade treaties, deploys structural funds, proposes directives. But it does not present itself before voters. It does not promise to lower taxes by autumn, solve immigration before legislative elections or bring back growth within two years. And it is precisely this comparative advantage that the data reveals.
Unkept promises as a driver of mistrust
According to Trustlab at the Oxford Blavatnik School, perceptions of institutional performance and perceived integrity are strongly associated with confidence in government. A government that keeps 70% of its promises and had announced ten may suffer more than an institution that promised none.
This mechanism has been known to political scientists since at least the 1990s. What is new in 2025 is its geographic breadth. TRUEDEM does not document a Franco-French or Italian-Italian phenomenon. The published results do not allow inferring that the perceived failure of governments strengthens by contrast confidence in unelected institutions.
Springer, in its 2025 report on institutional resilience and democratic sustainability, refines the analysis for Central and Eastern Europe. In countries like Poland or Romania, where governments have gone through acute legitimacy crises, confidence in unelected European institutions has served as a refuge. Citizens stopped trusting those who govern them, without ceasing to want to be governed. This withdrawal differs from a crisis of democracy itself.
This erosion of representation joins an analysis developed in What Democracy Can Function Without a Capable State?: trust is earned through the capacity to deliver.
The limits of the 52% score
We must also question what an institutional confidence survey really measures. Declared confidence in a distant institution is an attitude more volatile than attachment rooted in direct experience. Citizens who express confidence in the Commission have generally not seen it work tangibly in their daily lives: they respond to an overall perception, constructed by media, by contrast with their national leaders and by a diffuse sense of technical competence. This confidence is therefore more sensitive to external shocks than trust rooted in an experienced relationship of representation. A cyclical reversal, an unpopular decision or a visible governance crisis could erode it rapidly, without national governments necessarily benefiting from it.
The European Commission’s figure deserves to be looked at both ways. 52% is a relative majority, not a plebiscite. In 2007, this level preceded seventeen years of mistrust. And the Commission itself has had years where surveys credited it with less than 40% after the sovereign debt crisis.
Supporters of an optimistic reading of this data see in the return to 52% a sign that the European Union has regained credibility after Covid, the recovery plan and the response to the invasion of Ukraine. These are serious arguments. The Commission did indeed deliver concrete things between 2020 and 2025: shared vaccines, Next Generation EU, coordinated sanctions against Russia. Measurable results, within tight deadlines.
Both confidence levels fell in 2025, more so for national governments than for the Commission. If confidence in the Commission were rising because Europeans are satisfied with Brussels management, we would expect a correlation with satisfaction with the Union as a whole. This correlation exists, but it is weak. Confidence levels in the Commission and in national governments show distinct trends.
In other words: 52% is partly a vote against, not only a vote for.
Representative detachment, possible trajectory until 2035
A maintenance of the current gap without institutional response can feed questions about the legitimacy of elected governments. The mechanism is self-reinforcing: the less citizens trust elected officials, the less they engage in electoral processes; low participation may be associated with legitimacy issues, but its effect is neither automatic nor established as causal. And the loop resumes.
The main risk is progressive and consensual delegation to unelected institutions. Citizens shift governance toward bodies that do not formulate electoral promises and thus cannot disappoint them. This drift impoverishes representative democracy without formal rupture or force.
A significant decline in confidence in national parliaments could affect the legitimacy of collective decisions. European Union institutions would gain in relative stature without gaining in legitimate authority: a technocracy perceived as less bad is not a popular technocracy. This scenario has a political cost that right-wing and left-wing populisms know how to exploit.
The two levers that could reverse the trend
Oxford BSG and TRUEDEM do not only document the problem. Their work points to two levers that, according to available comparative data, merit attention in certain European countries.
The first is traceability of commitments. Countries like Finland and the Netherlands have experimented with forms of annual public reporting on government program implementation, produced by independent bodies. The effect is not to automatically make governments more popular. It is to change the reference point: government is judged on what it said it wanted to do, not only on diffuse feeling. When commitments are public, traceable and compared against results, citizens have an evaluation tool less dependent on media narrative.
And governments, knowing they will be measured, make more realistic promises.
The second lever is democratic control of the unelected institutions themselves. The confidence gap between the Commission and national parliaments is also symptomatic of a control deficit. The Commission is accountable to the European Parliament, but this control remains distant for most European citizens. Strengthening procedures by which national parliaments question, contradict and constrain decisions of unelected institutions would allow reducing their comparative advantage without weakening them. The objective would be for unelected institutions to be perceived as accountable, not just competent.
These avenues have nothing revolutionary about them. They guarantee no results. But the signals to follow are clear: in the next waves of the Eurobarometer, if the gap between Commission and national governments narrows without a decline in confidence in the Commission, this would be compatible with a relative gain in confidence toward governments, without establishing its cause; a mere stabilization of the gap is not enough. If the gap continues to widen, representative detachment will remain a possible trajectory.
Political parties and the state of representation
The weakness of parties also affects the quality of oversight that parliaments can exercise over executives. A parliament populated by formations with little legitimacy in citizens’ eyes loses some of its capacity to embody democratic checks and balances. The arbitrations it renders, the inquiries it opens, the votes it holds are perceived as internal games within an already discredited political class. This circle is particularly difficult to break because it does not depend on a single decision but on an accumulation of perceptions layered over several electoral cycles. Restoring confidence in parties thus passes less through isolated reforms than through a lasting change in the relationship between formulated commitments, decisions made and the visibility of this link for ordinary citizens.
The most illuminating figure of the 2025 Eurobarometer may not be that of the Commission. It is that political parties rank among the least trustworthy institutions in most countries, with notable exceptions like Denmark and Sweden.
Parties are the formal articulation between citizens and power. They select candidates, aggregate preferences, organize parliamentary majorities. When their confidence level declines significantly, the effectiveness of this articulation can be affected.
Comparative work associates political mistrust with voting orientations toward certain political formations, depending on context. This orientation is not necessarily a movement toward apathy, but rather a search for institutional or political alternatives distinct from the established party system. Institutional confidence trajectories show similarities across regions at different times.
This is a signal to monitor. Increased confidence in technocratic institutions without correspondence with the legitimacy of elected officials raises questions about the balance of powers.
The 2025 data show a gap in stated confidence between the European Commission and national governments, without being sufficient to diagnose institutional tensions. The 2025 data do not allow establishing direct causality between confidence in the Commission and disappointment with governments. This asymmetry can be corrected if elected governments accept being measured on their commitments and if unelected institutions accept strengthened democratic control. Neither of these movements is assured. Eurobarometer waves 104 and 105 have already been published; their results already allow observing the evolution of the gap.
Sources
- Eurobarometer, May 2025, Eurobarometer Survey 2025 (European Commission)
- TRUEDEM, Trust in European Democracies 2023-2025, 24 countries (comparative research project)
- Springer, Institutional Resilience and Democratic Sustainability (2025)
- Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, Why Trust Is Essential for Democracy and How We Can Build It, May 2025, https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/blog/why-trust-essential-democracy-and-how-we-can-build-it
