President Obama is battling public opinion headwinds as he promotes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on his current tour of Europe.
Thirty-five thousand anti-TTIP demonstrators turned out on Saturday, April 23, in Hanover, Germany, where Obama held meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and top executives of international corporations.
But the massive anti-TTIP demonstrations that have dogged the treaty for the past couple years are not the most important indicator that it is facing huge opposition. A new poll by Bertelsmann Stiftung, the German media conglomerate, and the polling firm YouGov shows that public support for “free trade” in general and the TTIP in particular have plunged dramatically in Germany since 2014, while TTIP support in the U.S. has also plummeted.
According to the Bertelsmann-YouGov survey, German public support for the massive “partnership” agreement has fallen from 55 percent approval in 2014 to only 17 percent in 2016. During that same period actual opposition to TTIP has grown significantly, from 25 percent in 2014 to 33 percent today. German support for free trade in general has dropped from 88 percent two years ago to 56 percent today.
In the United States, according to the survey, public support for the TTIP has taken a dive from 53 percent in 2014 to a mere 15 percent today. However, the polls shows that, in general, Americans still support the idea of free trade. “Compared to Germany, public opinion in the USA is more differentiated,” notes the Bertelsmann-YouGov poll. “Approval of free trade is generally stable and has even increased. However, the actual TTIP agreement has few proponents in the USA, and that number is shrinking. 82 percent of those surveyed in the USA have a positive overall opinion of free trade, representing an increase over figures from 2014 (71 percent).”
No comments:
Post a Comment