Is financial resilience and trust in Europe faltering?

00:00:33 - Mary McCaughey: Hello and welcome to this edition of Eurofound Talks. Today we are going to be talking about financial resilience. We're also going to be talking about trust and how that seems to be affecting Europe across all countries and all areas of society. 

00:00:53 - Mary McCaughey: We have a Eurofound online survey that we started during the COVID years, which seemed sometime back at this stage, where it allows us to take the temperature of what's going on at European level, but also at national level. How are citizens experiencing today's world? And it would seem from the feedback of our most recent survey, which is the 8th Living and Working in Europe survey, that Europe's population is not in a great place. 

00:01:27 - Mary McCaughey: We can see that despite inflation and employment stabilising following all of the turmoil of the early 2020s, it would seem that for most Europeans the feeling is one of deepening precariousness. The research that comes from the survey, which was carried out in spring 2025, shows that following many, many years of shocks—which were recession, high inflation, the COVID pandemic and most recently the wars on European and global territories—there has been a huge impact on the public. 

00:02:11 - Mary McCaughey: There's been a widening gulf in financial resilience. Most people seem to be talking about struggling to make ends meet and there's been a chronic burden which we've seen emerging for low-income households. It's an economic strain that is not just a matter of bank balances; it seems to have actually permeated Europeans and their psyche. That's translated into mental wellbeing where we've seen scores really decreasing. And we have also seen that now over half of the respondents in the most recent survey are indicating that they are at actual risk of depression. 

00:02:51 - Mary McCaughey: That seems to be not good news all round. Perhaps we will find that there are other glimmers of hope and optimism when we talk to Eszter Sándor, who is one of the lead researchers behind the Living and Working in Europe survey series. But it will also give food for thought for policymakers when they come together at the European Employment and Social Rights Forum, which is run by the European Commission DG Employment colleagues, which is taking place in early March and will be looking at many of the issues on the table to try and respond to Europe's growing social challenges. So, Eszter, this is a big number of topics that we'll be talking about today, but you're very welcome. 

00:03:36 - Eszter Sándor: Thank you. 

00:03:36 - Mary McCaughey: Eszter, before we get into the specific findings, perhaps you can tell me, firstly, what is this survey, how was it conducted, how many countries does it cover, what's the response rate, just to give us an idea of what we're looking at? 

00:03:51 - Eszter Sándor: So we started this, as you mentioned, as an experimental survey during the pandemic when we suddenly found ourselves with no data on how people are coping. And we were kind of surprised to see how many responses we got at the time on social media. And because of this, we were able to collect a set of regular respondents in a panel—not probably the panel, but yeah, in a panel—that are still replying to the survey. 

00:04:21 - Eszter Sándor: And we decided to continue this annually. So since in the pandemic we did more waves, but since 2022, we ran this survey every spring. So the next one will go into the field this year and yeah, I don't think it among our regular respondents as well as new recruitment through social media and the certain topics that we monitor in each round. So wellbeing, health and healthcare, work-life balance, social trust, trust in institutions, housing and income. These have been monitored every year, but we have been collaborating with three different other agencies to look at special modules in each year. 

00:05:02 - Eszter Sándor: So, for example, in 2023 we collaborated with the European Training Foundation on the youth and traineeships. In 2024 with the health module. Last year in 2025, we focused on green transition together with the Environmental Agency. 

00:05:18 - Mary McCaughey: With the Environment Agency, yeah, okay, so we can, I suppose we can suggest that the results that we're getting do take a very clear picture of the temperature of Europeans. On a more general basis, it's fair to say that even though it's perhaps not an entirely representative survey, it does give us a very good and clear picture of things. 

00:05:40 - Eszter Sándor: It does have a large sample size, so okay, we don't have the same number of respondents as we did during the pandemic when everybody was at home, which was over 60,000, but we still received more than 27,000 responses last year and altogether the series has been filled in by more than 300,000 times. 

00:06:02 - Mary McCaughey: And often isn't it fair to say that often when we map the results of this e-survey onto more profound, if you like, surveys that we see that it does actually reflect to a large degree the results that they are also receiving? 

00:06:13 - Eszter Sándor: Yeah. It so far has reflected the general trend, OK, if not precise percentages, yeah. 

00:06:20 - Mary McCaughey: But coming at it from that basis, Eszter, I mean it's, it's perhaps difficult for you to answer, but perhaps you can talk to me about the fact that we seem to have seen some level of financial recovery. We've seen inflation levels levelling off, decreasing, stabilising in some cases, but we still see Europeans presenting with high levels of insecurity, feeling that they are living precarious existence. Why is that financial recovery not translating to the household level? 

00:06:54 - Eszter Sándor: So not only has economic strain, which we are measuring by the ability of making ends meet, not recovered in our survey, but it has become worse, especially among the middle-aged populations. So for example, 40% of 50 to 64 year olds said that they are unable to make ends meet. 

00:07:15 - Mary McCaughey: 40%. 

00:07:15 - Eszter Sándor: 40% and 37% of 35 to 49 year olds. And why? So the data seems to show that this worsening happened especially among the low and medium income respondents, also single parents and multigenerational households. And this suggests that the kind of the most logical explanation is that the income increases did not catch up with the price increases. 

00:07:44 - Eszter Sándor: And also when it comes to savings, nearly a quarter of the respondents have no savings at all and another quarter have savings only enough to cover about maximum three months. So this suggests a sort of limited financial resilience. 

00:08:00 - Mary McCaughey: When you see this divide between the high and low income households regarding their ability to make ends meet, is this widening compared to the previous surveys? 

00:08:14 - Eszter Sándor: It's quite interesting that, not just from our survey, but other surveys immediately after the pandemic, we didn't see increasing inequality so much, which now we are seeing this. So especially since 2022, for example, low income respondents, now it's 61% of them that said that they cannot make ends meet. And this was 40% in 2023. And in the meantime, high income respondents remain more stable. So it seems that some of this is inflation, some of this is potentially housing costs and it had an unequal impact among households. 

00:08:51 - Mary McCaughey: And tell me, is there an age difference? 

00:08:55 - Eszter Sándor: Yes. So it is especially these middle-aged respondents, but in the past last wave, even among older people who said that so far that their making ends meet was quite stable, it has become worse in the last year. 

00:09:13 - Mary McCaughey: So in fact, at this stage, we're looking at a sort of a general feeling of precariousness, which is seen across many age groups, but also is affecting different income levels regardless whether they're high income or low income. 

00:09:31 - Eszter Sándor: Yes, especially high income respondents did stay quite stable. So it's low income and medium income respondents that reported this increase in difficulties. 

00:09:40 - Mary McCaughey: And I suppose one of the biggest issues that we're looking at in terms of insecurity is the housing issue. We've talked about that previously on Eurofound Talks, but maybe you can explain why you think on the basis of the results, why private renters are bearing such a disproportionate share of the current cost of living burden? 

00:10:00 - Eszter Sándor: So in the most recent survey round, we looked a little bit at savings and found that having low savings or no savings at all is especially higher among private renters than among homeowners. So private renters, 61% have not enough savings or like a very low buffer and they also have the most housing insecurity obviously. So they are the most likely to say that they might lose their home because they cannot pay any longer. And they are most exposed to these price shocks because increases in housing prices can be passed on immediately. And yeah, so it also relates to different rental market regulations in different countries. 

00:10:44 - Mary McCaughey: And of course, that has all the implications as the housing crisis in general has a range of implications when it comes to insecurity and feeling of precariousness. But I suppose one of the things which is most startling about the results from this most recent survey is the data on mental wellbeing. I mean, we've been watching that since COVID essentially. And it does seem that the results are quite alarming at the moment. From what I can see, 57% of respondents, which is nearly 60%, are presenting saying that they believe that they are at risk of depression. 

00:11:27 - Eszter Sándor: So the way we measure risk of depression is based on five statements of the WHO-5 index and this is a kind of five positive statements about how the respondent has felt over the previous two weeks. And the researchers figured out a way of calculating how this may translate to a risk of depression. And to be honest, we have been quite surprised by this. So we do know that this is a non-probability survey, yet it does have a large sample size. There might be an effect that people with lower mental health have more to say and they might be clicking on this survey. It might also be that because it's an online survey and there's no interviewer, they are more free to talk about mental health issues. 

00:12:10 - Eszter Sándor: But we just didn't expect worsening out among our own respondents so much, especially since the 2022 wave in line with the financial difficulties which suggest almost a kind of stress, like a chronic stress among the respondents. And we have measured improvement before. 

00:12:30 - Mary McCaughey: Exactly. 

00:12:30 - Eszter Sándor: So during the pandemic, for example, when the lockdowns were lifted, there was a significant improvement in this mental health measure. So mental wellbeing in this survey remains responsive to changes. But yeah, this year we looked a little bit more into the relationship between this economic insecurity we talked about and psychological strain. And yeah, we did find the same that when controlling for other factors, these people with disabilities, people with low income, single parents, those unemployed, those in the middle age groups that have the highest risk of depression. 

00:13:09 - Mary McCaughey: And I suppose, are there elements of geopolitical strain which are being brought to bear as well, in the sense that it is not only related to economic insecurity, but there's a feeling of political, social insecurity, societal insecurity, which is at play also? 

00:13:25 - Eszter Sándor: Yes, exactly. So when we looked a bit at optimism about the future, that was really decreasing since 2022 as well. So especially both optimism about your country's future and about your own future. Of course, when you look at your own future, those people less optimistic have a lower life satisfaction than those people who are less optimistic about your country's future. But both of them seem to be significantly linked to wellbeing. 

00:14:01 - Mary McCaughey: One of the questions I wonder when you talk about why has there been an increase in this risk of depression, is it also possible that those who are using social media more than others would be potentially either more prone to or be more affected by the extensive use of social media? 

00:14:21 - Eszter Sándor: Interestingly, this is something that we will know more about when we look at our European Quality of Life Survey data next year, because in this survey we have stopped asking people how often they use social media recently because they really recruited most of the respondents through social media. So we will not be able to get people who never use it or who use it very, very infrequently. But we did ask about trust in social media, which was low among everybody. So not just younger or older people, everybody. It was a scale of 1 to 10, it was about 3. 

00:14:56 - Mary McCaughey: So trust in social media is low, but people are using it. 

00:15:00 - Eszter Sándor: Those who are using it, the respondents are definitely using it. 

00:15:06 - Mary McCaughey: So, okay, so somewhat counterintuitive in that sense. And in terms of that optimism that you're talking about, about the future, I mean, why do you think that this has failed to recover? 

00:15:22 - Eszter Sándor: So just in my opinion rather than the data necessarily, optimism is related to fairness or perceived fairness and kind of progress. And the widening gap I mentioned before between high and low income respondents and other social groups I would say will decrease at a social level optimism. So when you see that some people benefit from the recovery and you don't, then you're not going to say you're optimistic about the future. But also what you mentioned about the geopolitical uncertainty and the economic uncertainty is also severe, especially among young people. 

00:15:59 - Mary McCaughey: And I suppose all of that level of insecurity feeds into, you talked about trust in social media, but also it's about trust in society, about trust in governments, trust perhaps in the EU. So more generally, we see from the results that institutional trust is a little bit sort of more scattered, more fragmented in terms of how it is presenting. What do you see as the specific link between a person's financial security, economic security and their trust in public institutions? Does anything present itself in the results? 

00:16:38 - Eszter Sándor: Yes. So consistently lower income respondents and those unemployed and in other types of vulnerable situations have lower trust in all institutions. And this trust is especially low among these middle age groups. So younger people are still trusting institutions more, but by the middle age this decreases. And this makes sense a little bit because we asked also this year about trust in healthcare and the pension system. And the more vulnerable situation you are in, the more likely you're going to face the failings of these systems if they exist. And at country level we regularly see lower trust among Southern and Eastern member states. 

00:17:23 - Mary McCaughey: And trust on a more general basis—trust, for example, in national governments, trust in media, trust in the legal system—have they all declined during this survey? 

00:17:34 - Eszter Sándor: Not 100%. So trust in the governments, for example, has been quite stable on average, but of course not at country level because governments are changing. But at overall EU level, trust in the national government in the past two years hasn't changed that significantly. It was changing more during the pandemic. Trust in the EU, it has been up and down each year. So it's interesting to see, but it's still young people who trust the most. 

00:18:03 - Mary McCaughey: And again, with reference to the European Quality of Life Survey, which will be carried out this year, are we looking at questions there which will be able to delve deeper into this aspect of trust? 

00:18:14 - Eszter Sándor: Yes, we're looking forward to comparing the findings of this survey to the European Quality of Life Survey. We are asking in detail about trust in institutions and we will ask about information received from news media, from social media, from scientists and experts. There's many interesting questions in this survey as well. 

00:18:32 - Mary McCaughey: And tell me, Eszter, is there a difference in gender approach to trust levels? Do you see more women or more men trusting or untrusting? 

00:18:44 - Eszter Sándor: We looked at this a little bit more this year just because we wanted to see, we looked at it more in terms of satisfaction with democracy, because this is also the core question. When we are asking overall trust, we mean usually trust a little bit more in institutions in terms of this democratic satisfaction. We expected some kind of a difference, especially among young people, but interestingly there wasn't a lot of difference. So young men and young women at an EU level trust the democracy at about the same level and among older people we found more that women are more satisfied with the democracy in their own country. 

00:19:21 - Mary McCaughey: And more generally, are older people more trusting than younger? 

00:19:24 - Eszter Sándor: No, younger people in institutions trust more. 

00:19:27 - Mary McCaughey: Hmm, okay. So interesting divides that are emerging also in terms of the different groups in society. 

00:19:34 - Eszter Sándor: Yeah. 

00:19:34 - Mary McCaughey: And I suppose more positively, we're looking here at young people and they seem to be more confident in institutions. That certainly is a good thing for the future, but they seem to be more pessimistic about their own personal prospects. So how do you marry the two there? 

00:19:53 - Eszter Sándor: It might be that again, just an idea, that a lot of this uncertainty about the future, maybe young people are perceiving it as coming from not necessarily their own countries, or at least not in every country, but from other countries abroad outside the EU as well. And also they might come from social media and other sources. They don't always connect it to their own institutions. In fact, it might be that they are expecting their institutions to solve some of this uncertainty. They have grown up with the EU as a relatively stable framework, so they might be looking at the EU specifically to solve some of the problems. For example, lots of positive developments such as mobility, climate change related policies and social rights. They have seen this happen, but middle age groups might feel a bit more disillusioned about this. 

00:20:50 - Mary McCaughey: Hmm. And I suppose the overall question would be what can be done about this? It seems that there are several issues which are really coming to the fore in the most recent survey. And it does allow us to take a snapshot, if you like, ongoing of how Europeans are experiencing their lives. And it's an important snapshot that we're able to take and to check in with how European citizens are feeling. 

00:21:19 - Mary McCaughey: But at the moment we are looking at policymakers to fix many of these issues, one of them being housing as we talked about before. But there are many other issues which are on the table, not least the Quality Jobs Roadmap Act, and then there's the Anti-Poverty Strategy which is coming on stream. We have the Gender Equality Strategy, which is being reviewed and updated. I mean, I think when we look at all of these initiatives, it would seem that we're working towards trying to seek out change. 

00:21:53 - Mary McCaughey: But we do have policymakers addressing and debating some of these issues when they meet together at the Social Rights Forum that I talked about—the Employment and Social Rights Forum—on the 3rd or 4th of March in Brussels. If you were to have a podium there, Eszter, knowing what you know from the survey, what are the most urgent messages that you would want policymakers to take away or to discuss further to explore solutions, potential results to address these? What would be your main three, if you can talk to me? 

00:22:27 - Eszter Sándor: So first of all these, as we mentioned before, this macroeconomic stability doesn't mean the same as recovery. So financial strain and housing insecurity are still rising. The cost of living crisis is not over. And housing, as we said many times in previous podcasts, is the main social risk. So targeted housing support would be one of the main focuses. 

00:22:51 - Eszter Sándor: And another one—we did talk about mental health. We feel that mental health cannot really be separated from social policy. So we see such a strong alignment between financial stress, housing instability and declining psychological wellbeing. So this is something to keep paying attention to. 

00:23:10 - Eszter Sándor: And when it comes to trust in institutions, this economic insecurity contributes to the erosion of trust and this declining optimism can be seen as a sort of warning sign for cohesion in the future. So there is a risk of disengagement, polarisation and it's very important to try to restore this optimism and trust. And this might not be related to kind of what we are talking about, but tangible financial improvements. So improving this resilience of households—not what politicians are saying, but what people can experience. 

00:23:52 - Mary McCaughey: So in fact, many of the issues that we've talked about today should very much be on the agenda at the Employment and Social Rights Forum, and they are big challenges, there's no doubt about that. The mental health issue we have discussed before as being a potential epidemic that is overtaking our society. Certainly these results would point to fairly alarming changes in the overall psyche of those who have responded to this survey. Indeed, trust and optimism, the levels of trust, something that we need to keep an eye on, particularly, as you said, because that has a direct impact on social cohesion. 

00:24:29 - Mary McCaughey: And without social cohesion, our societies collapse. And of course, the ongoing issue of housing, cost of living and making ends meet, financial insecurity. These are things which can be addressed with particular measures which are rolled out at European and at national level. Some of them are already underway. And the Pillar of Social Rights helps us look at how we can establish sound initiatives to move us forward on this direction to prevent further social polarisation. 

00:24:59 - Mary McCaughey: We wish you well at the Forum and we hope that some of these issues can be addressed and discussed with a view to reaching out to the citizen and addressing some of the clear issues which have emerged in our most recent online survey, Living and Working in Europe. Thank you, Eszter. 

00:25:19 - Mary McCaughey: Today and the findings of the latest Living and Working in the EU survey are available on Eurofound's website. You can scroll and compare by country and compared to the EU averages. You will also like to know that the next round of this survey takes place in April 2026, where we'll be able to look and see what changes have emerged during this period of time. Keep an eye on social media channels if you wish to complete that survey so that you can also make your voice heard. 

00:25:50 - Mary McCaughey: You can also join the 4th edition of the European Employment and Social Rights Forum, which we talked about earlier, which takes place online in Brussels, and you can sign up to that to attend virtually. And of course, you can delve deeper into many of the issues we've talked about today on mental health, on access to healthcare, on housing, on quality jobs, on anti-poverty and indeed on trust and optimism, which are pivotal to the success of our European Community. 

00:26:24 - Mary McCaughey: So keep following us on Eurofound Talks. And of course you can find us on Spotify or wherever you access your podcasts. Until next time when Eurofound Talks to you.