Europe’s Trust Divide | Can most people be trusted?

Trust in strangers isn’t evenly spread across Europe. In just 8 of the 42 countries surveyed does a majority of people say that most others can be trusted, and all of them are in Northern or Western Europe. Denmark leads by a wide margin, at 74%.

Across Southern and Eastern Europe, trust becomes scarcer. In much of the Balkans, fewer than one in five people say they trust others, and in Albania the figure drops to just 3%. The gap between the most and least trusting societies stretches to 71 percentage points.

What’s striking is that the differences don’t just follow regional lines. Spain, for example, scores more than twice as high as Portugal, and Belarus ranks ahead of France.