On June 23rd 2016, when the British electorate chose to leave the EU, it was rejecting the status quo. Britain had been ensconced in the EU for 43 years, and Brexit was the insurgent option onto which unhappy voters could project their hopes and fears. Ten years on, the sky has darkened amid trade wars, real wars, a rising China and an erratic and confrontational Donald Trump. Brits have realised that their hopes for life outside the EU have not been fulfilled. Brexit itself is now the status quo, and they have turned against it.
That much has become clear across recent opinion research, including past polling commissioned by ECFR. But a new series of four polls of British voters conducted for ECFR in May 2026 show that the shift may be more substantial still.
Surprisingly, not only do majorities of British voters think Brexit has damaged the country in various ways, but they are open to a new relationship with Europe that hitherto seemed out of the question. This includes embracing closer trading links, freedom of movement and supporting a European nuclear deterrent (with a plurality even favouring British participation in a European army). In part at least, Britain’s new pro-European majority spans the leaver and remainer camps.
The polling indicates that the bleak international situation has transformed domestic politics as well. Respondents hold both EU member states and the EU itself in much greater esteem than they do the US; a strong plurality identify more common interests with the EU than with the Commonwealth or the US; and many more Brits believe their continental neighbours would help them repel an attack than trust Washington to do so. Moreover, new ECFR polling within the EU, also published in this paper, shows that many voters there also look positively on the UK and prospects for closer relations.
So stark are these findings that they invite a healthy dose of scepticism. Can they really be true of a country that, even as an EU member, was often queasy about deeper integration? In which Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK is now leading in the polls? In which swathes of the media eco-system have long portrayed reopening the European question as tantamount to treason? In which, a decade on from the referendum, even many pro-European politicians have made their peace with Brexit?
Several factors might explain this apparent paradox:
- The country is now a decade on from the vote. The chaotic world of 2026 is significantly different to that of 2016 and in many respects darker and more daunting for a state like Britain—with the spectres of Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping looming large. With the UK’s main trading relationship damaged by Brexit and its security one undermined by an unreliable US president, it should thus not be unthinkable that voters’ outlooks have shifted, even drastically, in response. And that is without reckoning with the demographic churn of the electorate.
- Any such shifts linked to geopolitical or demographic change are bound to create a dissonance with a political and media class that often seems to be stuck in 2016. Witness the enduring habit of delineating the electorate into “leavers” and “remainers” (the latest example being the Makerfield by-election) and harking back to memories and reference points from the referendum.
- ECFR’s new polling shows that the old categories of “leaver” and “remainer” are losing their descriptive value, and reveals instead a more accurate and tripartite taxonomy of British voters in 2026: “Optimists” (who see themselves as part of a community of fate with their neighbours), “Realists” (emotionally open to cooperation but swayed by costs and practicalities) and “Loners” (who want to retain or increase Britain’s distance).
- Relatedly, the political geometry of the Europe question is shifting. In 2016, it split the British progressive vote; a wedge dividing the Labour Party’s post-industrial provincial base from its cosmopolitan big-city one. Today, support for a closer relationship unifies that coalition, from Labour to the Greens to even a majority of erstwhile Labour voters who now back Reform. The dividing line, meanwhile, is now on the right, with Conservative supporters in particular split on Europe.
It may well be the case that the pro-European turn revealed by the polling is shallow and perhaps even fleeting. If so, whether it translates into a real policy shift will depend on whether advocates of a closer relationship can mobilise and firm up this sentiment, or whether Eurosceptics can reframe debates and move opinion back their way.
The side that best shakes off the old thought patterns of 2016, and grapples honestly with today’s lived realities and sentiments, is the one most likely to succeed. The Brexit divide may have represented an earthquake in British politics a decade ago, and even a useful category in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, but with each passing year it is becoming less relevant as new experiences and debates reconfigure an electorate that is itself evolving over time. Talk of “leavers” and “remainers” is on the way to resembling that of Roundheads and Cavaliers in the English Civil War, or of supporters and opponents of the 19th-century Corn Laws; the relic of a long-past historical clash rather than a guide to future political behaviour.
This paper sets out both the pro-European turn in British opinion and the new categories of voters revealed by ECFR’s polling. It concludes with reflections on how to overcome the polarisation of recent years and forge a broad-based new consensus on the UK’s relationship with the EU in 2026.
About the author
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank.