EPP’s war on NGOs is driving a wedge through Europe’s political center

BRUSSELS — Europe’s centrist political forces have an uneasy feeling that the European People’s Party is abandoning them for the far right.

The center-right group — Europe’s largest political family and part of the centrist coalition that has dominated EU politics since the bloc’s inception — has been leading a political campaign against nongovernmental organizations using EU grant money to influence policymaking.

By targeting civil society organizations, critics say the EPP has embraced a cause associated with the right-wing fringes of politics, in a move that is reshaping EU politics as far-right parties make significant ground across EU countries.

The EPP dismisses such claims. It says it is simply demanding more transparency in how nonprofits use EU taxpayer money, having accused the European Commission of paying NGOs to lobby other EU institutions on its behalf to promote environmental laws.

But others disagree, including the two other biggest centrist groups in the European Parliament — the liberal Renew Europe group and the center-left Socialists and Democrats — who believe the campaign is an attempt to restrict NGOs’ influence in EU policymaking, a cause of the far right.

It’s driving a wedge between the EPP and its long-standing coalition partners — a shaky partnership that has nevertheless endured till now, keeping EU politics on the center ground.

“[T]he EPP is embracing an agenda of the extreme right,” Valérie Hayer, who leads Renew, said of the group’s campaign against NGOs, which she described as “deeply worrying” and “obviously meant to shrink political and democratic space for NGO work.”

Iratxe García, group chair of the S&D, said that “the right-wing forces which are currently targeting the NGOs have a clear and broader political intention that goes far beyond” and aims to “undermine the Green Deal, transparency, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and fundamental freedoms, all while delegitimizing civil society’s role in democracy.”

The EPP’s probe comes amid a never-slowing surge of autocratic forces making headway in EU countries including Hungary and Slovakia, but also the Netherlands, Germany and France.

Emboldened by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election last November, populist forces are increasingly legitimized, in EU capitals and in Brussels.

And that’s putting civil society organizations — whose role in the democratic policymaking process is enshrined in the Treaty on the European Union — at risk, according to a dozen lawmakers, policy experts and activists that POLITICO spoke to. 

The Greens, who are further to the left than the S&D on many issues and were a significant force in the last Parliament, draw comparisons with the U.S. under President Trump, who has slashed billions of dollars of government funding for NGOs since he came to office in January.

“There is a certain Trumpification of the EPP, not just at the European level, but we see it at national level as well,” said German Green lawmaker Daniel Freund. “Them going after civil society is one aspect of that,” he added. Other aspects include more collaboration with the far-right by, for example, “vot[ing] for their amendments.”

Conservative MEPs reject the idea that the group is collaborating with the far right. 

“The EPP is absolutely out of these games of the Patriots or other extremists from the right side,” said Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech MEP and coordinator for the EPP group in the budgetary control committee. 

But according to another Parliament official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, “⁠the whole initiative started with the Patriots and … a big part, a worryingly big part of the EPP fancies the idea.”

The Patriots for Europe group did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

A dangerous dance

Scrutinizing NGOs is the latest in a series of political fights in which the EPP has been courting parties much further to the right to serve its own interest — breaking the so-called cordon sanitaire, which historically prevented centrist groups from making alliances with the far right.  

Right-wing gains in last year’s European election mean the EPP can now pass legislation in coalition with groups to its right, without the support of Renew or the S&D.

It’s “the most dangerous dance in European politics,” said Daniel Kelemen, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an expert in EU law. Anti-democratic forces “can only really prevail … when they find centrist parties who are willing to … do deals with them and are willing to sell out their democratic values for power,” he said.

Increasingly however, this dance to assert its power within Parliament has come at the expense of the very European values that the EPP itself once championed.

“There is a double discourse from the EPP, saying it is seeking transparency on NGOs’ funding but actually using this narrative to attack them,” said Faustine Bas-Defossez, director at the European Environmental Bureau, an NGO. 

The EPP has been “radicalizing” its narrative to try to win back far-right votes in the EU election, she added, and flirted with the idea of collaborating with far-right groups in Parliament since. “It is a dangerous game where the EPP risks undermining the democratic fabric it claims to defend.”

The EPP rejects that it’s going after NGOs, but rather “demand[s] greater transparency in the relationship between nongovernmental organizations and EU institutions,” said the EPP’s Zdechovský.

“We firmly believe that if the EU is to remain trustworthy, it must uphold impartiality and resilience against any form of pressure — whether from the business sector or so-called civil society,” he added. 

German EPP member Peter Liese said he recognizes “the very important role of NGOs” in the EU decision-making process. “However, there have been clear instances of misconduct by some individual Commission officials and some NGOs,” he said, adding “it is encouraging that steps have already been taken to prevent such incidents in the future.” 

An EPP group spokesperson also told POLITICO that any claims that their probe into NGO funding echoes other political groups’ agendas is “utter nonsense.” 

Old grievances

It’s not the first time the EPP has voiced its concerns about how Brussels funds NGOs.

Back in 2017, German conservative MEP Markus Pieper authored a report calling for increasing the traceability of EU funds and for NGOs to disclose other sources of funding. Pieper also suggested that some Commission departments were “exploit[ing] the distribution of EU grants for their own political agenda.”

Ultimately that report had a limited impact, and its publication was derailed because of timing — which came just as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pitched a controversial law in Hungary aimed at cracking down against civil society. That prompted the EPP to try and distance itself from anti-NGO discourse championed by Orbán’s Fidesz party. 

But what really changed things was a fight over new EU rules to boost nature protection across the bloc, during which the EPP suffered a crushing political defeat when it failed to block the adoption of the new rules.

“The Nature Restoration Law was a turning point,” recalled the EEB’s Bas-Defossez. “It created some frustration within the group, not just over the outcome, but over the visible public mobilization around it. Since then, we’ve seen the EPP shift its political agenda in a worrying way: targeting civil society actors who advocate for environmental ambition.”

NGOs and scientists spent months pushing back against misleading claims — promoted by the EPP on social media — that the rules would hurt farmers and threaten the EU’s long-term food security. 

The legislation was narrowly adopted in plenary after few EPP members broke ranks. It was a significant political victory for former Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans, the headline defender of the legislation; and an equally significant defeat for EPP leader Manfred Weber as he was trying to conquer the farmers’ vote and win back voters from the far right just a few months ahead of the EU election.

The fight left the EPP feeling wounded and bitter — but the group eventually came back swinging. 

Now, similar demands and accusations to Pieper’s are being reiterated by German EPP members including Monika Hohlmeier. As a close ally of Weber, she has been spearheading a push in the Parliament’s budgetary control committee to investigate EU funding contracts, flagged alleged irregularities and accused the Commission of paying NGOs to lobby other EU decision-makers on its behalf.

Hohlmeier did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for an interview. 

Since then, POLITICO revealed that NGOs had been told by the Commission to change their grant applications to comply with new guidelines — or risk losing their funding. “They were very strict about the [2025] annual grant, removed any mention of talking to MEPs,” said a senior policy officer at an NGO, granted anonymity to speak freely about the confidential contract.

MEPs from other right-wing groups were quick to chime in on the topic. EU-funded NGOs are “a network of political activists who want to implement the Commission’s policies and left-wing ideologies,” the far-right Patriots for Europe group said in a statement, after the European Court of Auditors slammed the Commission for not properly monitoring how funds are distributed to NGOs, especially if they are used for lobbying activities.

Changes to the EU’s transparency rules in 2021 allowing self-declared noncommercial organizations not to disclose how much money they spend on lobbying have indeed made it harder to track the extent of some NGOs’ advocacy activities.

Collectively, NGOs declare spending €159 million on EU lobbying efforts according to EU data compiled by LobbyFacts. However, more than 70 percent of nongovernmental organizations in the EU Transparency Register are registered as noncommercial, and therefore don’t disclose any spending.

NGOs fear that these political grievances will yield further cutbacks in the upcoming EU budget negotiations. “It is a very legitimate fear and I carry personally that worry too,” the Parliament official quoted earlier added. 

The new boogeyman

In Europe, autocratic governments and far-right political forces have been targeting civil society groups and their donors for years. That strategy has seeped into EU politics. 

“Attempts to discredit funding for civil society organizations [are] not new,” said Carlotta Besozzi, director at Civil Society Europe, but “the current attacks take place in a much more difficult climate” in which “much stronger far-right political groups” are operating in the European Parliament. 

Earlier this month, Slovakia’s parliament passed a controversial law targeting NGOs’ funding structures, after its populist Prime Minister Robert Fico vowed to end “NGO supremacy” in the country after his reelection in 2023.  

In Hungary, Orbán’s government has often cracked down on NGOs and other groups critical of his government with legislation aimed at slashing their funding and liberties. 

Orbán famously has an axe to grind with Hungarian-born U.S. billionaire and philanthropist Geroge Soros, who founded the Open Society Foundations and supports civil society groups and grassroots movements. During the first Trump administration, anti-Soros sentiment in Eastern European countries grew. 

Back in February, Germany’s incoming conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz was criticized for his inquiry targeting NGOs.

And increasingly, the discourse against NGO funding is seeping into politics in Brussels, where far-right parties are targeting the EU itself as one of the biggest donors to NGOs.

For Georgetown University’s Kelemen, “What we’re seeing is, in a sense, a translation of that script to the EU level, where instead of Soros being the boogeyman, it’s the EU.”