Eleonora Poli European Sovereignty Commentary on the Findings of the Survey in Italy SOVEREIGNTY – AN AMBIVALENT CONCEPT The concept of European sovereignty, like that of sovereignty in general, has negative overtones for the majority of Italians who, as the IPSOS survey highlighted, would seem not to ful­ly understand the term. There is nothing random about the fact that European sovereignty in Italy is frequently viewed in terms of the imposition of rules working against people’s in­terests, with 64 % of Italians seeing it as bound up more with the ability to impose one’s interests than in governing for the common good. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly played a part in this. Ac­cording to a Università di Siena and Istituto Affari Internazion­ali(IAI) study carried out in November 2020, 56 % of Italians would vote against a referendum on Italy leaving the Europe­an Union. By contrast, in spring 2020, in the midst of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a climate of profound inse­curity, together with a slow response by the European institu­tions in Italy’s aid and that of other hard-hit nations, 44 % of Italians were in favour of EU membership against 48 % in fa­vour of Italexit. Whilst the data gathered in November 2020 was generally positive, showing an improvement in Italian trust in European institutions, the figures are still low com­pared to 2017 when 61% were in favour of remaining with­in the EU. quently accentuated by sovereignist parties such as Lega and Fratelli d’Italia. These parties have built their electoral strate­gies around a supposed top-down relationship between the ‘elite’ and the‘people’ and collusion with Brussels bureaucrats depicted as immoral and self-serving. If the supporters of these parties necessarily see European sovereignty as ex­tremely negative, those who do not support them also view the term sovereignty negatively as linked to‘sovereignism’. Effectively, as the survey made by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Fondation Jean Jaurès highlighted, there is nothing random about the fact that the concept of sovereignty is seen as politically right wing in the Italian political context. In Italy, and in the European Union in general, sovereignist parties have built their political agendas on nationalism,‘muscular’ political action and forms of economic protectionism. In ef­fect, it is the theoretical definition of sovereignism which best fits the way sovereignty is viewed by the Italians, as based on nationalism(58 %), power(46 %) and protectionism(26 %). This explanation to some extent converges with the statistics showing that only one Italian in three(35 %), and the under 35s or those with a left-wing political orientation in particular, have a negative vision of the term‘sovereignty’ in general in which it is seen as associated with the right. Effectively the majority of those voting for and supporting Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, and thus without a negative vision of sovereignty/sov­ereignism per se, are over 35. At this juncture the lack of support for European sovereignty is to be explained by limited pro-European sentiments fre­In conclusion, in Italy, support for European sovereignty is handicapped by a mistaken understanding of the term sover-