Focus on Italy European Sovereignty Ipsos survey on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Survey conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Some 8,000 people were interviewed over the internet via Ipsos’ Access Panel between 28 December 2020 and 8 January 2021, making up eight samples of 1,000 ­persons representative of the national population of persons aged 18 and over in France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden. The sampling was carried out in accordance with the q­ uota method(sex, age, occupation, rural/urban location, re­gion). This summary presents the results on Italy. IN ITALY, SOVEREIGNTY GENERALLY HAS ADVERSE CONNOTATIONS ticularly far from what is observed in Germany, where only 9 % of respondents opt for»outdated«, 44 percentage points below Italy. In seeking to explain this phenomenon a first clue lies in the fact that Italians are more likely to attribute the term to a political affiliation. Just over one in three Italians(35 %) re­gard sovereignty as a»right-wing« idea, as against only 5 % of Germans. Italians and Germans do agree on one thing, however: it is not a left-wing idea(only 6 % of Italians and 3 % of Germans take this view), the remainder of respond­ents opting for»neither left-wing nor right-wing«(48 % in Italy and 77 % in Germany). The more intense»politicisa­tion« of the word»sovereignty« in Italy leads to more divid­ed views, and it’s understandable that left-leaning Italians take a more negative view, something also observed in France. Out of the eight countries in the survey the term»sover­eignty« has the worst connotations in Italy. Just over one in three Italians(35 %) – especially those below 35 years of age and people with left-wing sympathies – have a negative view of the word, as against 21 % who take a positive view and 38 % whose opinion is»neither positive nor negative«. At the same time, it is only in Italy that an absolute majority considers sovereignty to be»outdated«(53 %), as against a mere 10 % who consider it to be»modern« and 31 %»nei­ther one nor the other«. This is far above the European av­erage(32 % consider the term to be»outdated«, 20 % »modern« and 40 %»neither one nor the other«), and par­A second clue is provided by the closed questions. Respond­ents are provided with a list of words that they may or may not associate with the term»sovereignty«(they have to choose two). The top three choices among Italians are»na­tionalism«(mentioned by 58 %),»power«(46 %) and»pro­tectionism«(26 %), while Germans choose»independence« (63 %),»self-determination«(53 %) and»freedom«(35 %). In these two countries people are clearly not talking about the same thing.