DAVOS, Switzerland: People around the world place much more trust in their companies than their political leaders, according to a major survey that suggests a mood of uncertainty and pessimism on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows only one in five people believe the economic, political and social system is working for them, while nearly 60 percent think trade conflicts are hurting their companies and putting their jobs at risk.
The sense of gloom is strongest in developed markets led by Japan, where 84 percent of the general public — excluding the ‘informed public’ who are college-educated, earn above-average incomes and consume news regularly — do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time, followed by France at 79 percent, Germany at 74 percent and Britain at 72 percent. That is far above the average 49 percent of the 27 countries examined in the research.
Amid low confidence that politicians will fix the problems, these people are turning to companies, with 75 percent saying they trust “my employer,” compared to 48 percent for government and 47 percent for the media.
“CEOs now have to be visible, show personal commitment, absolutely step into the void, because we’ve got a leadership void in the world,” Richard Edelman, head of the communications marketing firm that commissioned the research, told Reuters.
Optimism was higher in the United States, where nearly half of the general public believed they would be better off in the next five years. The corresponding figure there was 62 percent for the better-educated, higher-earning “informed public.”
“The stock market was very good, the deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy — it’s pretty good if you are an elite,” Edelman said of the US findings.
The survey, based on the opinions of over 33,000 people and conducted between Oct. 19 and Nov. 16, is published on the eve of the Davos gathering in the Swiss Alps, which this year brings together some 3,000 business and world leaders amid anxiety over the US-China trade war, Brexit and a slowdown in global growth.
“Violation of trust“
The pessimism in Japan, France, Germany and Britain reflects a variety of factors.
“I think Japan’s never really recovered from Fukushima, there was such a violation of trust when that happened,” said Edelman, referring to the authorities’ botched response to a massive nuclear accident in 2011.
Signs of slowing global demand and a sharp rise in the yen have clouded the outlook for Japan’s export-reliant economy, and the government plans tax hikes to pay for ballooning health care costs for its rapidly aging population.
“The problem for the three (European) countries.... is that given the reality of the potentially diminished economic future, there is deep anger in advance,” Edelman said.
In France, what started as a grassroots rebellion by low-paid workers to protest taxes on diesel fuel and a squeeze on household incomes has morphed into an assault on President Emmanuel Macron and his reforms, seen by the protesters as favoring the wealthy.
And in Britain, the Brexit crisis intensified last week after Prime Minister Theresa May’s two-year attempt to forge an amicable divorce from the European Union was crushed by parliament in the biggest defeat for a British leader in modern history.
The survey found that while only 49 percent of the wider population trusted institutions such as governments, this figure rose to 65 percent among high-income, college-educated and well-informed people — the biggest gap since the research began 19 years ago.
Despite widespread distrust of the media, uncertainty about the future has led to a sharp jump in people’s consumption and sharing of news and information, up 22 percentage points in a year to 72 percent.
But more than 70 percent said they worry about false information or fake news being used as a weapon.
In the United States, where President Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced the media as purveyors of fake news, trust in media varied widely depending on political affiliations.
Those who identified themselves as Republican voters showed only 33 percent trust in media, while 69 percent of Democrats did so.
Eve-of-Davos survey shows people place trust in companies over governments
Eve-of-Davos survey shows people place trust in companies over governments
- Only one in five people believe the economic, political and social system is working for them
- Nearly 60 percent think trade conflicts are hurting their companies and putting their jobs at risk
Trump targets non-white immigrants in renewed xenophobic rants
- During a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Trump doubled down on his tirade against Somali migrants
- "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? Trump told his cheering audience
WASHINGTON: Back in 2018, President Donald Trump disputed having used the epithet “shithole” to describe some countries whose citizens emigrated to the United States.
Nowadays, he embraces it and pushes his anti-immigrant and xenophobic tirades even further.
Case in point: during a rally in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday that was supposed to focus on his economic policy, the 79-year-old Republican openly ranted and reused the phrase that had sparked an outcry during his first term.
“We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?’” Trump told his cheering audience.
“But we always take people from Somalia,” he continued. “Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Recently, he called Somali immigrants “trash.”
These comments are “more proof of his racist, anti-immigrant agenda,” Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey responded on X.
The Trump megaphone
Florida Republican lawmaker Randy Fine, on the other hand, defended Trump.
“Not all cultures are equal and not all countries are equal,” he said on CNN, adding “the president speaks in language that Americans understand, he is blunt.”
University of Albany history professor Carl Bon Tempo told AFP this type of anti-immigrant rhetoric has long thrived on the far-right.
“The difference is now it’s coming directly out of the White House,” he said, adding “there’s no bigger megaphone” in American politics.
On the campaign trail in 2023, Trump told a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Now back in power, Trump’s administration has launched a sweeping and brutal deportation campaign and suspended immigration applications from nationals of 19 of the poorest countries on the planet.
Simultaneously, the president ordered white South African farmers to be admitted to the US, claiming their persecution.
No filter left
“Any filter he might have had is gone,” Terri Givens, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and immigration policy expert, told AFP.
For Trump, it doesn’t matter whether an immigrant obeys the law, or owns a business, or has been here for decades, according to Syracuse University political science professor Mark Brockway.
“They are caught in the middle of Trump’s fight against an invented evil enemy,” Brockway told AFP.
By describing some immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” — as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did earlier this month — the White House is designating a target other than itself for American economic ire at a time when the cost of living has gone up and fears are growing over job security and loss of federal benefits.
But, Bon Tempo noted, “when immigration spikes as an issue, it spikes because of economics sometimes, but it also spikes because of these larger sort of foundational questions about what it means to be an American.”
On November 28, after an Afghan national attacked two National Guard soldiers in Washington, Trump took to his Truth Social network to call for “REVERSE MIGRATION.”
This notion, developed by European far-right theorists such as French writer Renaud Camus, refers to the mass expulsion of foreigners deemed incapable of assimilation.
Digging into the “Make America Great Again” belief system, many experts have noted echoes of the “nativist” current of politics from the 1920s in the US, which held that white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture was the true American identity.
That stance led to immigration policies favoring Northern and Western Europe.
As White House senior adviser Stephen Miller recently wrote on X: “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies...At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
