“We all thought that there wouldn’t be an enemy any more,” Rob Bauer, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, said recently. Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has confronted NATO—a transatlantic defence alliance founded after the second world war to deter Soviet expansion—with the reality of an aggressive foe on its eastern borders. As NATO’s leaders make their way to an emergency summit in Brussels on March 24th, support for the alliance is rising across Europe.

Surveys by YouGov, a pollster, have been tracking Europeans’ attitudes towards NATO since the start of the war. In five countries YouGov has found respondents ever keener on staying in the security alliance. In a sixth, Sweden (a non-member, for now) there’s been a sharp uptick in support for joining.

Nowhere has the shift in the perception of NATO’s value been more marked than in France. In 2019 Emanuel Macron, the country’s president, told The Economist NATO was experiencing “brain death”. Now Mr Macron’s tune has changed. He says that Russia has given NATO “an electroshock”. Just under half of French respondents favour membership. Though that is less than in any other member country polled, support has climbed from 39% to 47% between March 2019 and March 2022.

In Germany the rise in approval has been matched by military promises. On February 27th the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, vowed to raise defence spending to at least the NATO target of 2% of GDP and establish a €100bn ($110bn) fund for the armed forces. Germany has looked like a weak member of the pact for its previous reluctance to reach the target. A poll on March 2nd found that 53% of respondents supported the strategic U-turn; 27% thought the government’s actions did not go far enough.

Other pollsters in Sweden and Finland, non-members that have borders with Russia, indicate that for the first time the majority of residents in both countries want to join NATO (though YouGov’s estimate of support in Sweden, at 44%, falls short of that). Support for NATO in Poland, which has been a member since 1999, is the strongest of all countries polled by YouGov, at 77%. Being next door to a war no doubt concentrates minds. ■

For a look behind the scenes of our data journalism, sign up to Off the Charts, our weekly newsletter. Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here.