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Europe is suffering from many ills, and one of them is the deteriorating trust in public institutions, after decades of polarisation. Both sides of the political aisles have historical reasons – perhaps both real and imagined – to distrust the established corps of judiciaries, law enforcement, and government officials.
For the left wing, there may be a prevailing belief that the public institutions are corrupted by capitalism or repressive reactionary forces. The left also has a history of antagonism towards traditional ‘bourgeois’ authority, such as policing and property rights.
For the right wing, and especially as of late, public institutions may instead be seen as being infiltrated by progressive bureaucrats, created by radical university professors with the purpose of overthrowing traditional ways of life and ushering in a new global order.
As our era’s most significant opposing political visions are coming to a head across Europe in various elections, citizens become more wary of the corruption of their common institutions, regardless which of the two above narratives they more lean into. In a recent report by Polling Europe, more Europeans, spread across the entire EU, believe that the integrity of their country’s justice system is compromised by political forces, than those who believe that the justice system is independent as advertised. This distrust is not evenly spread out – it is more common on the right – but the findings make it clear that there is a crisis of trust in the European courts.
Is the right right about the courts?
In total, 57 percent of over 5 000 respondents to Polling Europe believe their country’s judiciary is “conditioned by political powers”. Most of them (37 percent in total) believe it is only partial, but 20 percent believe that their justice system is completely compromised. Just over a third, 36 percent, trust their judges to be “independent”. Only 9 percent believe the ideal of a “completely independent” judiciary to be true. The ‘conditioned’ extreme is thus twice as large as the ‘independent’ extreme.
Moreover, 50 percent of respondents claim to have only “a little” or no trust at all in their judicial system, compared to 46 percent who were more optimistic.
The result begs the question of what Europe’s political future looks like. With the number of radical ideas concerning migration and civil liberties floating about in the political discourse, politicians are going to be dragging courts into uncharted territory for a long time to come, all across Europe. It is then paramount that the public confidence in the rule of law is maintained. As it stands right now, our civilisation has evidently failed in this maintenance.
According to the poll, respondents who last voted for a party affiliated with the ECR European parliamentary group are most skeptical about the independence of the courts, at 73 percent. This group’s voters, neck-to-neck with the voters of the more hard-line nationalist PfE and ESN groups, also have the least trust in their judicial system. The left-wing and more centrist groups’ voters had significantly more optimistic views of the judiciary, and in particular Green voters.
If the popular perceptions that are illustrated by the numbers are any indication of reality, the conservative and nationalist narrative about progressive-biased courts seems to ring the most true. The case for the right-wing narrative is also helped by recent controversial court rulings in different parts of Europe that have been accused of standing in the way of electoral democracy; the banning of two nationalist candidates from the Romanian presidential election, and the banning of the prolific Marine Le Pen from the French presidential election. Worth mentioning is also the controversies surrounding the recent codification of “two-tier justice” in the United Kingdom, where judges were instructed to give ethnic and religious minority criminals advantages in sentencing.
This all comes off the back of the legal systems, not only of the United Kingdom, but also Germany and Sweden, being criticised internationally for violating the human rights of freedom of speech, in a series of incidents that have also particularly been perceived as biased against conservatives and nationalists.
Imagined or real, the biases show that the judiciaries of several European countries have a perhaps near-impossible task of rebuilding trust with their citizens.
An observation about the difference between trust and independence
The Polling Europe results show that the public’s appreciation for independent courts is not necessarily congruent with the trust that they put in them. There is no group polled where the numbers match perfectly.
In some groups the difference is marginal; among liberals voting for parties belonging to the RE group, 50 percent trust the courts, while 48 percent believe them to be independent, and for ECR voters the numbers are 29 and 22 respectively. For Green voters however, only 47 percent believe the judiciary to be independent, but still as many as 60 percent trust the courts. Perhaps this reflects an attitude that some accept the justice system to be rigged, as long as it is in their favour.
Conversely, while the concept of courts being independent of political manipulation is a tenet central to the rule of law and Western society, some groups may not trust a court that really is fully independent from politics. After all, legal scholars and interpreters may need checks and balances as well, one could argue. This resembles an attitude that has been evoked by various right-wing populist leaders in various times and places, to hold the judiciary accountable in the name of democracy.