The affordability crisis that upended global politics last year continues to ripple across some of the world’s biggest democracies — punishing incumbents and undermining longstanding political alliances.
New international POLITICO polling shows the voter frustration with persistent financial strain remains a deeply potent force today. In five major economies, The POLITICO Poll found ongoing cost-of-living pressures continue to reverberate through politics:
- In the United States, where Donald Trump returned to power on a campaign of economic populism, nearly two-thirds of voters — 65 percent — say the cost of living in the country has gotten worse over the last year.
- In the United Kingdom, where voters ousted the Conservative Party in 2024 after 14 years of rule, 77 percent say the cost of living has worsened.
- In France, where President Emmanuel Macron is grappling with historically low favorability ratings, almost half of all adults — 45 percent — say their country is falling behind comparable economies.
- In Germany, after prolonged infighting over the economy, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition collapsed last year. There, 78 percent of respondents say the cost of living has gotten worse over the last year.
- And in Canada, a post-pandemic affordability crisis helped fuel a public backlash against then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government ahead of his resignation earlier this year. The POLITICO Poll found that 60 percent of adults in the country say the cost of living is the worst they can remember it being.
The results, from POLITICO and Public First’s first-ever joint international poll, illustrate the uphill battle many leaders face in trying to contain the intertwined economic and political unrest. Five years after the coronavirus pandemic upended the global economy — and as the world contends with competing conflicts and AI rapidly becoming a defining force — meaningful shares of respondents across the U.S., Canada, and Europe’s biggest economies of Germany, the United Kingdom and France view the cost of living as among the biggest issues facing the world right now.
But as leaders seek to address the affordability concerns, many say that their leaders could be doing a lot more to help on the cost of living, but are choosing not to.
That has left incumbent governments grappling with how to manage the rising economic dread — and control the resulting political backlash. It has also created an opportunity for opposition parties on economic messaging.
“For incumbents it’s very difficult to run on these platforms,” said Javier Carbonell, a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre. “Today, center-left and center-right parties are seen as incumbents, and as the ones who are to put the blame.”
Voters are pessimistic about the cost of living
There is a pervasive sense in the five countries that their economies are deteriorating.
In France, 82 percent of adults say the cost of living in the country has worsened over the last year, as do 78 percent of respondents in Germany; 77 percent of adults in the United Kingdom and 79 percent in Canada say the same.
A majority of people in all five countries go even further, saying the cost of living crisis has never been worse.
In a further sign of the trouble facing leaders, the poll results suggest many view affordability as a systemic problem more than a personal one. Majorities across the countries, for example, say the issue of affordability is the high cost of goods, not that they are not paid too little.
In the U.K., roughly two-thirds of adults say the country’s economy has deteriorated — greater than the 46 percent who say their own financial situation has worsened over the last year. That same pattern holds for France, Canada and Germany, suggesting the public holds broad concerns about the economy and affordability that go beyond their individual lives.
While the European Union’s economy is set to grow by 1.4 percent in 2025, the economy in Germany has weakened over the past two years, and is expected to stagnate this year. In France, a series of government policies aimed at addressing cost-of-living concerns have contributed to an exploding national debt, which currently stands at nearly $4 trillion USD.
In the United Kingdom, the results come against a backdrop of sluggish economic growth, with incumbent Prime Minister Keir Starmer struggling to convince voters that his center-left Labour Party can drive down the cost of living.
And in Canada, the country’s deep-seated anxiety is born out by federal inflation data. Statistics Canada reported this week that the consumer price index ticked up 2.2 percent in November compared to the same month in 2024 — nearly a bullseye on the central bank’s 2 percent target.
Negative economic views are shaping politics
Voters’ economic concerns are roiling politics.
In 2024, Trump ran a campaign on economic concerns without having to oversee the economy himself. That dynamic has shifted in recent months, with voters beginning to sour on his handling of the economy, underscoring the difficulty of convincing voters of economic progress amid stubborn cost-of-living concerns.
That feeling of falling behind was particularly acute among European respondents in the POLITICO Poll, with nearly half of adults in Germany, France and the United Kingdom saying that their country is “generally falling behind other comparable economies.”
That pessimism has pushed many people out of the political process, Carbonell said, “because there’s no expectation that things are going to change.” For others, it’s fueling a search for political alternatives.
“There is this increasing demand for a very anti-system politics,” he said.
In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz made revamping the economy a central campaign promise. But since taking office, he has been preoccupied with geopolitical issues, including the ongoing trade war and the Russia-Ukraine war.
That has become a successful line of attack for Merz’s critics — among them the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now polling in first place. The party has accused Merz — whose approval ratings are at an all-time low — of not paying enough attention to the needs of the people in his own country, nicknaming him the “foreign policy chancellor.”
In France, the government is looking to roll back some of the policies it rolled out in response to cost-of-living concerns, but doing so could prove particularly unpopular with a population laser-focused on high costs. It could also fuel anti-establishment parties on the right and left, which have made the issue a central weapon against France’s crumbling political center.
David Coletto, a longtime pollster in Canada and CEO of the firm Abacus Data, has for years tracked affordability concerns — and found widespread concern among most survey respondents.
“This is not a marginal concern or a background anxiety,” he wrote of results from POLITICO’s November poll. “It is a dominant lived experience that continues to shape how Canadians interpret government performance, leadership, and competing policy priorities, alongside concern about Donald Trump, trade, and global instability.”
Affordability messaging will be a central message in upcoming elections
Affordability will be a central feature of elections across the globe next year — with some of that messaging already underway. In the U.S., Democratic candidates from New York to Georgia focused much of their 2025 campaigns on lowering the costs of living, and both parties are planning to center the issue in the midterms.
“For now, the cost of living remains a warning light rather than a red light for the Carney government,” Coletto wrote. “But the intensity of feeling, combined with seasonal pressures and fragile household finances, means the issue is unlikely to fade quietly into the background.”
Starmer’s government — languishing in the polls and facing local elections in 2026 — has pivoted in recent weeks to a more explicit focus on affordability.
The U.K. government has also floated freezing train fares, lowering energy bills, and boosting the minimum wage in an attempt to solve the affordability crisis, but a record-high level of taxation confirmed at a government-wide budget last month risks blunting its economic message.
In Germany, the issue of affordability may gain new momentum when voters in five federal states head to the polls to elect new state parliaments next year. In Berlin, the far-left Left Party, for example, plans to take a playbook from the affordability-centered campaign of New York’s Zohran Mamdani as a model for the state elections in September.
With local elections also taking place across France next year, and a presidential election in 2027, these issues are likely to continue to take center stage, especially in the larger cities where pricing pressures have been particularly acute.
In Paris, the outgoing center-left administration has been praised for making the city greener and more pedestrian-friendly, but far more needs to be done on affordability, said David Belliard, a member of the outgoing administration and the Green Party’s candidate for mayor.
“We’ve spent a lot of time fighting against the end of the world,” Belliard said, “but maybe not enough helping people make it to the end of the month.”
POLITICO’s Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed to this report from the United Kingdom, Victor Goury-Laffont contributed to this report from France, Nette Nöstlinger contributed to this report from Germany and Nick Taylor-Vaisey contributed to this report from Canada.
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