February 2022 and November 2024 were two successive hammer blows to what remained of the post-Cold War geopolitical order in Europe. If it was not already abundantly clear that the continent has entered a new era, it is now. Voters in the United Kingdom and the European Union grasp this, and are rethinking old geopolitical assumptions. One of the most striking shifts concerns the relationship between the two.

While the British government and the European Commission are edging only slowly towards closer cooperation, public opinion is far ahead of them. That is the central finding of a major new ECFR opinion poll conducted in the weeks immediately after the United States presidential election. Comprising 9,278 respondents across the UK and the EU’s five most populous countries, it shows strong support on both sides for an ambitious reset that cuts across many of the red lines that constrained the relationship before Donald Trump’s win in November.

A majority of voters in Germany and Poland – and a plurality in France, Italy and Spain – think that the EU should be willing to make economic concessions to the UK to secure a closer security relationship. And in the UK, a majority of voters (including 54 per cent of those who voted for Brexit in 2016) would be willing to accept free movement in exchange for a stronger economic relationship with the EU. Our polling also shows that when it comes to their economic future, tackling migration, and even security, more Brits look to the EU than to the US as their country’s most important partner.

The Brexit referendum is now over eight years behind us. When British voters decided to leave the EU, Barack Obama was still in the White House. The UK was enjoying a much-hailed “golden age” in its relations with China. The covid-19 pandemic had not yet struck. And Russian president Vladimir Putin had yet to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many Brexiteers hoped that Britain would thrive as a free-wheeling, buccaneering trading nation in a world of ever-more open markets. On the EU side, although most governments were distressed by British voters’ decision, quite a few were also quietly relieved to see the back of an often troublesome and reluctant partner.