EU? No! Ne! Nie! Nyi! Nei! Non! Nein!

FRANCE

AS FOUNDING fathers of the original Common Market the French have traditionally stuck up for the EU. Now the plunging euro, increased economic competition from neighbouring countries and an increase in their cost of living has made them think otherwise.

“The Daily Express is right to highlight the problem with the EU,” says Lyon-based economist Jacques Martinez. “It would be good if France could leave it but that may never happen. However there is no reason why Britain shouldn’t. And I suspect it would only strengthen your country.”

Sylvie Auteau, who runs a clothes shop in Le Blanc, central France, says: “With the expansion of the EU to the east we feel we’re being overtaxed, that we’re feeding everyone else.” She’s so angry about the euro that she still accepts the old franc, a currency that is still legal tender in France until 2012.

FOLLOW THE EXPRESS ON TWITTER!

Traditionally France is a farming nation but the sector has suffered massively because of competition from other EU countries such as Italy and Spain. “Our incomes go down around 10 per cent a year,” complains Gilles Lefevre, who runs a cattle farm in Normandy. “Europe was meant to protect our livelihoods but it’s turning into a disaster for all of us. It’s all part of a global economy that shows no loyalty towards local producers.

“The European Union has left many of us at our wits’ end. Europe has turned into an absolute nightmare. It would have been better if we’d been left to feed our own people, as French farmers used to for centuries.”

IRELAND

DESPITE an imminent Greece-style bailout from the EU, there is growing resentment that it helped fuel the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

Commentator Emmet Oliver says: “With the exception of the Irish government, no other body has done more to heap mountains of bank debt on to Irish taxpayers and businesses than the EU Commission.”

As Ireland boomed, driven by an unsustainable property bubble, the EU was popular but there are signs of disillusionment over the EU’s role in the nation’s financial crisis. Paul McNern, a taxi driver in Donegal, says: “We’ll never get out of this debt, not even my children, or my grandchildren. People are very angry with our government and the EU.”

Bizarrely, despite having to go cap in hand for help, the Irish government is still paying out money to bail out Greece. Meanwhile it will be expected to pay a fortune in interest on its own loan.

ESTONIA

THE adoption of the euro is looming in the small Baltic state but many people don’t want the currency, nor do they want to be tied so irrevocably to the European Union.

Estonia has the lowest debt in the EU and one recent survey shows that two-thirds of the population are opposed to the European single currency – due to be introduced on January 1 – and to closer ties with Brussels. Their government has spent a fortune on a leafl et campaign and issued free calculators to every household in a vain attempt to win over doubters.

Eurosceptic campaigner Anti Poolamets says Estonians fear price rises and will be sorry to see the end of the kroon, which was reintroduced after independence from Moscow in 1991. “I oppose the change due to my deep belief that the Estonian economy does much better outside the eurozone, where it is so common for states to run up huge debts and live beyond their means,” he says. “We’re giving away a huge tool to manage our economy by ourselves.”

SLOVAKIA

WHEN Slovakians voted to join the EU six years ago they thought they would be getting handouts, not giving

them. Alone among EU states, Slovakia held out against the deal to bail out Greece earlier this year, refusing to stump up any cash. Its £660 million share of the loan was eventually paid by other EU member states.

Furious bureaucrats threatened legal action but found there was little they could do to force Slovakia to comply. Among Slovakians there was huge public support for the government’s stand.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Iveta Radicova says: “We had a diffi cult time with fundamental reforms before we joined the EU. No one helped us. We did not get a cent. Nothing. It was our citizens who had to carry the burden and it was not easy. But we got through this phase with very unpopular, painful reforms. How should I tell our citizens that we should now help those who are not prepared to do something themselves?”

Slovakia’s economy, powered by car and electronics exports in factories run by foreign giants, was hard hit by the global slump and this year it launched a biting austerity drive.

GERMANY

THE lustre of the EU is beginning to wear off for many Germans who now view it as a vast, unaccountable bureaucracy that stole their beloved deutschemark and gave them the struggling euro in return.

Professor Wilhelm Noelling, professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, who is mounting a legal challenge against the bailout for Greece, says: “The euro is the greatest mistake in the history of currencies. It is a disaster for Germany and Britain should be thankful that it is not in it. The experiment with the euro and this fabricated union between countries that are so different has failed. Why didn’t people recognise this catastrophe was headed our way when they brought it in?”

Unlike Britain the Germans no longer have the freedom to cut their own interest rates to stimulate growth. The Bundesbank’s powers have been handed to a central European bank. He adds: “Germans have had no house-price bubble or wage rises to sustain them in recent years but they have seen billions of their taxes given away to other countries.”

On the streets there’s open dissent against the EU, once feted for helping Germany forge new business opportunities, which is typifi ed by Rita Seewald, a cleaner from Berlin. She says: “The European Union was just one of the great con tricks of all time. We were all ripped off. Now it is Germans who are being asked to bail out people in the world who don’t work as hard as us or save like us.”

SPAIN

IT IS being hinted that debt-ridden Spain could be next to go cap in hand for financial support.

No one’s yet suggesting Spain should leave the EU but the euro is not so popular, blamed for pushing up the cost of living. Many businesses took advantage of the introduction of the single currency to inflate prices and millions of Spaniards still feel more at home talking pesetas.

In an article headlined The Euro Sank Us, commentator Andres Chaves wrote in respected El Dia: “The price of a weekly shop rocketed. No one controlled prices. The cost of clothes went up, so did luxury items. This was when a country that couldn’t cope began to get poorer and a crisis came that took the smile off our face. The common currency might have been good for the EU’s rich countries but for Spain it was a disaster.”

Madrid shop worker Miguel Moreno, 32, says: “Europe’s not working. Spain’s worse off now than a few years ago. Unemployment is worse than it has ever been, the cost of living is sky high and we’re being asked to bail out other countries when we’re struggling to look after ourselves.”

AUSTRIA

Burgeoning support for Eurosceptic Heinz-Christian Strache suggests that Austrians are falling out of love with the EU.

Many of his influential campaigns revolve around promises to “put Austria first” and he claims that EU membership strips away freedom and neutrality and has caused prices to soar.

As Austria suffers its worst unemployment figures since the war he says farmers have suffered and their businesses have been dying out since Austria joined the EU. A survey of Austrians this year revealed that only 36 per cent thought belonging to the EU was beneficial.

Strache, who has condemned the bailout of Greece, says: “We want a federalist Europe, not a centralist one.”

ICELAND

Iceland has gone cool on the EU following its own financial crisis. At the height of the Icelandic crash there was support for joining the EU but now 60 per cent want their island to be left alone to sort out its own problems.

The country applied for EU membership last year but Icelanders blame the EU for siding with the UK and the Netherlands in a row over the collapse of the Icesave bank.

Bjarni Benediktsson, chairman of Iceland’s Independence Party, says: “This idea is stranded. The people don’t want to join the EU at the moment. It was a wrong move to apply for membership.”

Halli Fridgeirsson, a business expert at the marketing company IceNews, adds: “We are a small country and if we join the EU people fear we will be forgotten and also be forced to give away fishing rights. They are also bitter that the EU did not help us in our own financial crisis, which we’re now sorting out.”