Over the past few months, FTM journalists Dieuwertje Kuijpers and Lise Witteman compiled two separate datasets. The first, containing the 2014-2018 annual budgets of the 10 Europarties and their respective thinktanks that currently receive funding from the European Parliament, was released on April 23. The second dataset, containing all 997 traceable donations and contributions made to all 15 existing EU parties and their respective thinktanks between 2014 and 2018, is available today (April 30).

The European Parliament is under increasing pressure from (corporate) lobbying. After the Lisbon Treaty expanded legislative powers to parliament in 2009, Brussels experienced a lobbying boom. Since lobbyist operate behind closed doors and the media often focus on national parties or representatives when covering the election, this has garnered relatively little attention.

The EU itself has made several attempts to increase transparency. In 2008, the European Commission had created a voluntary transparency register; this was merged with that of the European Parliament in 2011. As of April 26, 2019, the website of this registry lists a total of 11,743 registrants.

The aforementioned website eloquently explains the need for transparency: ‘Citizens can, and indeed should, expect the EU decision-making process to be as transparent and open as possible,’ its front page reads. ‘The more open the process is, the easier it is to ensure balanced representation and avoid undue pressure and illegitimate or privileged access to information or to decision-makers. Transparency is also a key part of encouraging European citizens to participate more actively in the democratic life of the EU.’

Well-intentioned as these efforts may be, they are falling short. In September 2015, Transparency International EU found that over half of the entries on the lobby register were ‘inaccurate, incomplete or meaningless’. The NGO subsequently filed 4,253 official complaints with the Secretariat of the Transparency Register. Two years later, November 2017, the Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory also reported ‘dodgy data, under-reported spending, missing entries, and a lack of enforcement’.

In 2016, the European Commission proposed to make registration mandatory for all three European institutions — that is, for the Commission, the Parliament and the European Council. Although the European Parliament took a major step bty voting to end secret meertings between MEPs and lobbyists on January 31, 2019, the European institutions have yet to implement the mandatory lobby register. As of February 14, 2019, the three institutions intend to ‘continue their discussions on moving towards a joint mandatory Transparency Register.’

In order to gather from which outside sources Europarties acquire their funds, we thus decided to create our own database. We investigated all traceable third party contributions and donations made to these parties. Parties need to demonstrate they are capable of independently acquiring a certain percentage of equity before they are eligible for funding from the European Parliament. Even though the acquired sums are — in absolute terms — modest, the 8.7 million euros of third party income acquired by European parties does reveal the ideological networks willing to fund these representatives.