Filed by KOSU News in World News.
November 2, 2009

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europeans are firmly committed to democracy and free markets, but with more reservations than in the past, a new poll says.

“Put simply: During the communist era, or just as it was ending, most people were pretty miserable about the way things were going in their lives,” Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, which conducted the poll, tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “They are less miserable now, but there are greater cleavages in these societies than there ever was.”

The poll of nine Eastern European countries found broad support for the end of communism. Large majorities — 80 percent or more — in the former East Germany and the Czech Republic backed democracy and the free market.

In many countries, however, there was less enthusiasm.

In Russia, the percentage of people satisfied with a multiparty system was 53 percent. In Hungary, it was 56 percent. In Ukraine, only 30 percent said they approve of the change to democracy; 36 percent said they approved of capitalism.

“We had large majorities back in 1991 even before these people had fully seen the experience of capitalism and democracy,” Kohut says.

Pew, then known as the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, conducted a similar poll in 1991, when communism had ended.

Kohut says one of the findings of the poll release Monday was that many former Soviet satellite states — such as Poland and the Czech Republic — were glad to see an end to Russia’s influence on their counties. In Russia, however, there was a dramatic rise of nationalism. In 1991, 37 percent of Russians said it was natural for Russia to have an empire; now, the figure is 47 percent. Meanwhile, 58 percent of Russians say it is a great misfortune the Soviet Union no longer exists, according to the poll.

Kohut says the numbers overall show there is a strong correlation between support for parliamentary democracy and capitalism.

“The people who think the economy is going well tend to support democracy,” he says. “The people who don’t tend to think the economy is going well are much less supportive.

“And what we do find in these societies that we did not find two decades ago are huge gaps in the way people make their evaluations in every one of these countries, with the young being more satisfied and the old being less satisfied,” Kohut says.

The new survey was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 24 among 14,760 respondents in 14 countries, including Germany and eight former communist countries. The margin of error varied between plus or minus 3.5 and 5 percentage points. Copyright 2009 National Public Radio