Focus on Latvia 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 aged 18 and over in France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Swe­den. The sampling was carried out in accordance with the quota method(sex, age, occupation, rural/urban location, region). This summary presents the results on Latvia. vey(46 per cent), while falling short of the scores registered in Germany(73 per cent) and Poland(69 per cent). Latvia sets it­self apart in terms of its sharp generational divide: sovereignty evokes»something positive« for 45 per cent of 18–34-year­olds, 60 per cent of 35–49-year-olds, 64 per cent of 50–59-year­olds and 74 per cent of those 60 years of age and over. The so­cial divide is almost as clear: 76 per cent among the most high­ly educated have a»positive« view, 50 per cent among the less educated, 73 per cent among the most affluent and 58 per cent among the least affluent. SOVEREIGNTY: A POSITIVE BUT DIVIDED VIEW Despite a highly unusual political history – creation of the first Republic of Latvia in 1920, loss of independence in 1940 and regained only recently in 1991 – Latvia does not stand out as much as some other countries in the survey. Overall, the results for Latvia are fairly close to those of countries that have a posi­tive view of sovereignty and European sovereignty, such as Ger­many and Poland. Latvians thus react favourably to the word»sovereignty«, which conjures up»something positive« for 61 per cent of them(2 per cent have a negative view, 29 per cent have a view that is»nei­ther positive nor negative«). This score is 15 percentage points higher than the average among the eight countries in the sur­Going into more detail, one in three Latvians(33 per cent) con­sider the word»sovereignty« to be»modern«, 17 per cent find it»outdated«, while the majority(42 per cent) opt for»neither one nor the other«. A large majority(60 per cent) do not attach a political affiliation to it: below one in five Latvians(18 per cent) consider sovereignty to be a»right-wing« idea, as against 5 per cent who regard it as«on the left«. In Latvia, sovereignty mainly evokes the notion of»independence(mentioned by 72 per cent), and to a somewhat lesser extent»freedom«(45 per cent) and»self-determination«(42 per cent). This trio is also found in Germany and Poland(and to a lesser extent in neigh­bouring Sweden), a far cry from France and Italy, where the words»power«,»nationalism« and»protectionism« take the top three places. None of these words are mentioned by more than 15 per cent of respondents in Latvia. Finally, turning from words to ideas associated with sovereign­ty, Latvians are perfectly in line with the average in the eight countries in the survey.»Independence in relation to others« is