Commission’s ‘NGO gag order’ will boost corporate lobby power

The time has come to silence green NGOs in Brussels, according to the European Commission. As reported by Politico, the EU’s funding of environmental non-profits including Friends of the Earth, WWF, and ClientEarth, is under attack.[*] This is in the context of the LIFE programme, a €5.4 billion initiative to support environment and climate action, a tiny fraction of which is used to support NGOs. The European Commission is currently sending letters to these groups, warning them not to spend it on advocacy work. 

This is the latest salvo in a long-standing campaign by conservatives in the European Parliament to use EU grants to silence criticism and opposition. Emboldened by the current strength of their allies on the far right, now they have the numbers in parliament to act, and the consequences could be dire. Corporate interests already significantly outnumber and outspend public interest groups in EU lobbying; without EU funding for NGOs this problem would become even far worse, negatively impacting the quality of EU decision-making and public trust.

Clearing a hurdle for corporate interests

The EU institutions have a problem that has haunted decision-making for decades. A huge army of corporate lobbyists surrounds the seats of power in Brussels, and is massively present at each and every step of law-making. Well before anything is presented to the public, these lobbyists are in on strategy talks with the Commission and the Council, they help develop draft laws, they write amendments for MEPs, they are all over the place when new rules are to be implemented to make sure their achievements in earlier phases are carried out. 

In the face of this colossal force, a strong presence in Brussels of NGOs and social movements of all kinds that speak on behalf of other interests, is absolutely crucial. Indeed, as Politico reports, cancelling the tiny proportion of LIFE funding that went to green NGO advocacy "would be a strong shift in policy from the Commission as it was originally thought of as a means to provide a balance to corporate lobbying interests". Yet currently the European Commission is contemplating cutting its financial support to NGOs, more specifically to prohibit the use of EU funding for advocacy. Not a dime for alerting politicians and civil servants to the risks of climate change, or threats to biodiversity, to name but a few disasters. 

From Qatargate to Piepergate

The origins of this crackdown is a campaign waged by the conservative European Peoples Party at least since 2016, spearheaded by then MEP Markus Pieper from Ursula von der Leyen’s German CDU party. Their logic was always that organisations that do not support their policies, and that go against some of the EU’s policies, should lose their funding. Pieper tried twice to convince a majority to use the threat of an end to EU funding as a weapon against NGOs. 

In 2017, on the back of the defeat of a comprehensive trade and investment agreement with the US (TTIP) which the NGO sector – along with much of civil society – had successfully campaigned against, Pieper tried to convince the European Parliament to demand an end to funding of organisations whose policies were not supportive of the “strategic commercial and security-policy objectives” of the EU. The next wave of attack came in late 2022, as the EPP responded to the Qatargate scandal with a renewed push against NGOs. That was when it was revealed that several MEPs in the past and present had been bribed by the Qatari and Moroccan regimes to fight off any criticism of those countries’ poor human rights records from within Parliament. The response by the EPP to tighter ethics rules, and proposed reforms to increase transparency were, to put it mildly, lukewarm. In contrast the EPP saw the fact that a fake NGO had played a role in the case, as an opportunity to launch yet another weird attack on NGOs in general. “We need to talk about NGOs” as an EPP tweet read. This despite the fact that out of 128 lobbying entities from the 21 case studies we have conducted since 2015, featuring covert influencing efforts by Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Azerbaijan, Qatar, China, we found only one NGO. 

In January 2024, that renewed effort with Pieper in the lead resulted in the adoption of a motion in the European Parliament full of unsubstantiated claims that NGOs represent a particularly problematic category among the recipients of EU funds. “This report lacks evidence and facts… it aims at shifting the responsibility of bribery scandals within the EP to the NGO sector,” said Civil Society Europe – a coordinating body for civil society organisations at EU level – in a press release. 

It was soon clear that Piper had the ear of his German party comrade, Ursula von der Leyen. Still in January 2024, von der Leyen announced the appointment of anti-regulation zealot Pieper as her special advisor on SMEs, circumventing internal rules about such appointments. In April, amidst heavy criticism of von der Leyen, including from her own colleagues in the Commission, for circumventing the rules for appointments, Markus Pieper was forced to withdraw. 

The gag order

Yet less than a month later, on 7 May 2024 the Commission published new guidelines on grants that followed the logic of Pieper’s attacks on NGOs. According to the guidelines “avoiding reputational risk” is a benchmark for EU funding of NGOs, and that risk is particularly stark if a grant is used for “sending letters, organising meetings or providing advocacy material to EU institutions or specific members of an institution; or identifying specific members or officials of an institution to evaluate or describe their positions, or to discuss specific political content or outcome”. Should an NGO cross the vaguely and broadly described line, a grant can be denied or suspended. 

If these guidelines might be considered a de facto order to silence NGOs from coming anywhere close to a contentious issue, one where eg. corporate interests are at stake, then the design couldn’t be better. Though shrouded in vague terms such as “reputational risk” and with a claim to consider “freedom of expression” a “main guiding principle”, it is a simple gag order. If the requirement to be cautious if an activity is about providing material and organizing meetings on “specific political content”, is to be taken at face value, this has the potential to remove support from all NGOs based in Brussels to secure a voice for people and planet – a very different voice than all the corporate lobbyists that routinely inhabit the Commission’s advisory groups, the so-called expert groups, invited by the Commission to provide “specific political content” to its draft EU laws and strategies. 

It’s also worth noting that this attack is also coming at a time when trust in democratic processes is at a dangerous low. 

Putting on the squeeze

One may ask what “reputational risk” the Commission is talking about, but NGOs active in Brussels won’t have to look far: it is an attempt to stifle criticism of the very same politicians in the European Parliament that keep repeating the risk as a mantra. Along with occasional outbursts from representatives of Big Business and some Commissioners, they are the only ones concerned with a campaign against NGO involvement and influence on EU decision-making. A complaint from the EPP or the far rights in the European Parliament may be enough to deem an NGO initiative “a reputational risk”. 

And the Commission has put the bar low. In response to a comment from NGOs that in fact their funding is – in part – supposed to be used to help develop EU policies, the new Romanian budget Commissioner Serafin said, that even if “not breaching the legal framework”, activities directed at EU institutions “entail a reputational risk”. In sum, should NGOs do advocacy work that may upset the EPP or the far right, there could be immediate sanctions from the Commission. 

It does not take much knowledge about life in the Brussels bubble to imagine the dire consequences if or when this is used to cut or remove funding of green NGOs. The scales will tip even further. With one hand, the Commission takes more steps to silence NGOs. With the other, they greet yet another group of oil and gas companies to help with its energy strategy, and praise corporate lobbyists from the energy sector for their efforts. For years now, funding of NGOs has helped a bit to counterbalance the massive wealth and power used by corporate lobby groups to influence EU decision-making. Now, that imbalance is set to become worse. 

Can it be stopped?

It is not that the thought of micro-managing or threatening NGOs has been an alien thought to the Commission over the years. In June 2021 then-Health Commissioner Kyriakides announced a full stop to operating grants to health NGOs, on the back of two years of a conflictive relationship over the Commission’s handling of COVID vaccines, including its dealings with big pharmaceutical companies on procurement, and its approach to patents. Difficult to see that move as anything but retaliation as well as an attempt to tame and neutralize criticism. Incidents like that are, in a nutshell, why Corporate Europe Observatory cannot afford to take EU funding! But in that case, the move by the Commission to defund health NGOs was broadly denounced, including by 56 MEPs, and in the end, the idea was dropped. 

The question is if the decency and democratic spirit of such a broad group of Euro-parliamentarians can be called upon again. Hopefully. The EU is on the brink of embarking on a bold strategy to provide massive financial and regulatory support for industries – especially in energy, tech and energy-intensive industries. And in parallel, the Commission is planning to introduce a plethora of inroads to power for preferred and privileged stakeholders: those speaking on behalf of European corporations. In the absence of civil society watchdogs, the risk of plunging into an orgy of corporate welfare at the cost of people and planet is growing all the time. 

[*] Full transparency: Corporate Europe Observatory has a policy of receiving no funding from EU grants and thus runs no risk of losing income from this NGO crackdown.