Across Europe, a coordinated assault on civil society is unfolding with surgical precision.
From Brussels to Budapest, from Bratislava to Sofia, EU institutions and national governments are deploying a five-step playbook to eliminate the independent organisations that stand between corporate power and the public interest.
The playbook is brutally efficient: fabricate a scandal, delegitimise and defund organisations into dependency on philanthropic support, then criminalise their new funding as foreign influence, all while continuing to demand NGOs services for consumer protection and digital rights enforcement that governments refuse to fund themselves.
The timing is no accident: this campaign accelerates precisely as Europe turns its back to the Green Deal and its digital rulebook to embrace "simplification" – the mantra-like belief that gutting regulations will unleash economic potential.
Under the cover of strengthening democracy through transparency, governments are dismantling the architecture of accountability that makes democracy possible.
The epitome of this attack is the creation of a dedicated Scrutiny Working Group on NGO financing within the EU Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee to investigate how certain NGOs have been financed by the EU Commission.
After a decade-old anti-NGO campaign, the dominant EU political party — the centre-right EPP — backed by the far-right, pro-Trumpian Patriots for Europe, succeeded in weaponising a parliamentary tool otherwise reserved for genuine scandals like Dieselgate against organisations traditionally playing an accountability and expert role in policy formation and enforcement across EU policy.
Welcome to the playbook for killing civil society.
In late 2024, conservative MEPs and rightwing outlets accused environmental and health organisations of misusing EU funding from the LIFE programme, the €700m annual budget supporting climate and environmental action, including advocacy work directed to the EU institutions.
The charge: using public money to advocate for stricter protections through lobbying.
The accusation itself exposes the agenda. NGOs working on pesticides, PFAS "forever chemicals," and air pollution were attacked for doing precisely what their funding mandates: translating scientific evidence into policy recommendations.
When these recommendations threaten corporate interests, advocacy becomes "inappropriate lobbying."
The EU Court of Auditors found no misuse. Yet the attacks continued, amplified by a months-long campaign led by German EPP members and enabled by Germany’s AfD and other far-right groups who already succeeded in May 2024 to have the Commission issuing guidelines prohibiting EU grants for NGO 'advocacy work' that creates 'reputational risk' — including sending letters to MEPs, organising meetings, or discussing policy positions.
The disinformation persists – with EU commissioner Olivér Varhélyi stating that EU grants to cover NGOs' day-to-day costs are "illegal" – because its purpose is stigmatisation.
With public opinion poisoned, governments build permanent surveillance infrastructure. By formalising what Civil Society Europe describes as an “NGO hunt", the EU’s parliamentary working group merely codified a trend long underway across its member states
Slovakia's April 2025 law passed after 13 months of chaotic rewrites — so incoherent that one observer noted "not even God could make sense of it" — yet it imposes crushing bureaucratic requirements on all NGOs.
Hungary's May 2025 proposed "Transparency in Public Life" bill enables fines up to 25 times any foreign grant amount, payable within 15 days, with EU funding now classified as "foreign influence." Prime minister Viktor Orbán calls independent journalists and civil society "bugs" to be "wiped out." Slovakia's prime minister Fico declared in 2023: "The era of NGOs ruling this country is over."
These aren't regulations, but permanent mechanisms aims at debilitating EU civil society and chilling its action.
Systematically eliminate public funding or delay its transfer to maximise organisational uncertainty. The European Public Health Alliance cut 40 percent of staff in 2025 when operating grants disappeared.
The Netherlands slashed €2.4bn in annual development aid from 2027.
France reduced overseas development by 37 percent - €2.1bn gone. Germany halved humanitarian aid. Sweden terminated national NGO funding agreements to align with national priorities.
More insidiously, the EU appears poised — by subsuming the LIFE Programme into a 'Competitiveness Fund' — to make all funding transfers conditional upon explicit commitments from beneficiary NGOs to abstain from any form of advocacy work – thus effectively prohibiting them from engaging politically with EU institutions.
This transforms civic organisations into service contractors, permitted to implement programmes but forbidden from commenting on, critiquing, or seeking to influence the very policies they're tasked with executing.
NGOs face an impossible choice: accept funding with a ‘gag order’, or maintain their advocacy role while watching their operations collapse from financial starvation.
Once delegitimised and defunded, NGOs get criminalised due to the resulting dependency on philanthropic funding.
Hungary's proposed law requires citizens donating to listed organisations to provide a "private deed with full evidentiary force" proving domestic origin — or face criminal forgery charges.
Slovakia's League for Mental Health, trusted for decades, now faces accusations its director calls "cynical fraud charges for something we could not have done and did not do."
The same EU Commission proposed in the previous legislature to set up a mandatory transparency registry for third-country lobbying as part of its "Defence of Democracy Package". The EU’s own version of foreign agent laws might soon be revived.
While attacking European NGOs for accepting philanthropic support, several governments welcome the flood of MAGA money reshaping Brussels.
Conservative donors, be they EU ultra-net-worth individuals or American culture warriors, pour millions into new institutes, think-tanks, and advocacy groups aligned with the Trump agenda.
Meanwhile, the same MEPs investigating environmental NGOs or other public interest groups for "inappropriate lobbying" attend lavish conferences funded by US conservative foundations.
Foreign influence isn't the problem — progressive foreign influence is.
After defunding NGOs, criminalising their funding sources, and questioning their legitimacy, political leaders expect the same organisations to continue serving as on-demand input providers to policymaking and the EU's enforcement infrastructure — tracking violations, gathering evidence, supporting victims, filing complaints.
Ireland's Digital Services Coordinator employs 45 people to regulate Big Tech, the entire system relies on NGO expertise as "trusted flaggers."
National consumer protection authorities designate civil society groups as "external entities" in enforcement networks.
EDRi's 47-organisation network defends GDPR, files complaints, monitors Digital Services Act compliance, doing work governments won't fund. These organizations provide the enforcement infrastructure for consumer protection and digital rights while simultaneously being investigated, defunded, and delegitimized.
EU leaders stand at podiums championing consumer protection and digital rights, knowing they've outsourced enforcement to organisations they're systematically destroying
Europe’s governments may soon discover that the question is no longer whether NGOs can survive, but what, and who, fills the vacuum when they don’t.
Civic organisations were never designed to exist for their own sake; they emerged because governments could not, or would not, perform essential democratic functions: scrutiny, participation, and protection of rights. Those functions do not disappear as that space collapses; they migrate to corporate lobbyists, opaque consultancies, or ideologically driven foundations.
If Europe’s institutions allow this shift to continue, they will not just lose civil society, they will privatise accountability itself, and with it, the credibility of European democracy and governing capacity.
Democracies rarely fall by force; they erode through complacency.
Each time the EU treats public scrutiny as obstruction, and trades participation for “simplification”, it weakens its own capacity for self-correction. Ironically, it is precisely this diminished capacity for self-correction that Europe's current crises demand most urgently.
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Alberto Alemanno is a new columnist for EUObserver, an academic, author and one of the leading voices on the democratisation of the EU. He is Democracy Fellow at Harvard University, Jean Monnet Professor at HEC Paris and founder of The Good Lobby.
Alberto Alemanno is a new columnist for EUObserver, an academic, author and one of the leading voices on the democratisation of the EU. He is Democracy Fellow at Harvard University, Jean Monnet Professor at HEC Paris and founder of The Good Lobby.