Why the lack of transparency on European political parties public funding?

If the European Union wants to act on the global stage as a democracy with moral standing, it cannot be an exception to rules on political transparency.

This is in line with the principle of subsidiarity: affairs should be handled at the level at which they are best handled.

However, this increased involvement and decision-making power devolved to European institutions and politicians, albeit alongside national executives, must go hand-in-hand with a greater democratic control by European citizens.

Act in our name, but with our consent.

Political parties are cornerstones of modern democracies. They allow us to carry political projects beyond individual politicians' personalities and egos. They ensure the durability of political ideas. 

The flip side of this coin is the political power amassed by parties, and repeated scandals have highlighted the need for strong ethics and transparency provisions written into law.

In particular, the transparency of political finance is a core principle of, and often a major challenge for, democratic societies.

Data — online, complete, contextual, accessible, timely

Data on the funding of political activities must not merely be published online, but should also be complete, contextualised, available in a timely manner, directly accessible, and easy to scrutinise by civil society and the general public.

These principles form the preconditions for accountability.

And while transparency provisions may have gained ground at the national level, the same cannot be said of the European level, where transparency on European parties and their funding often falls short of expected standards.

This impacts not only the public funding of European parties, but also the donations and contributions they receive, and is the result of a culture averse to transparency.

Public funding from the EU's budget is a crucial element for European parties, and regularly accounts for 85-90 percent of parties’ funding — even more so when factoring in national public funding indirectly gathered from the contributions of national member parties.

Four years ago

Since 2004, over €600m was made available to European parties, and around €360m was actually disbursed between 2004 and 2021. And yet, as of April 2025, due to a convoluted funding mechanism, the most recent year for which European parties' final amount of public funding is known is 2021.

Information on donations and contributions is provided with less delay, but with its own shortcomings.

Donations by individuals under €3,000, which form the vast majority of donations, are not identified by name, and donations by individuals or companies under €12,000 may take up to two years before being made public.

These limitations are compounded by an unwillingness to put transparency first. For instance, over the past seven years, the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF, the body regulating European parties) has consistently refused to publish official EU data on European party funding before its entry into force, which would greatly help citizens grasp the evolution of this funding over the past decades.

It has also not sought to accompany its data with any graph, table or interactive tool to make its information more readable, and has regularly deleted past information, hiding it from public view.

For its part, the European Parliament has sought to redact its funding decisions for up to eight years after the fact, and even argued that MEPs' party affiliation was personal data that should not be made public.

It only relented on both counts following action by European Democracy Consulting. 

Even staying clear of more political and wide-ranging proposals, a lot can be achieved via concrete, technical proposals.

Among the most important elements is the development of an online reporting and disclosure system to facilitate the reporting of information by European parties, and its review and publication by the APPF.

Well-designed, in conjunction with all stakeholders, this tool would not only bolster transparency for European citizens, but also ease the burden on parties and institutions.

A more symbolic, but nonetheless essential reform is to give the APPF a mandate of public information, so as to clearly make it part of its role to inform citizens on their common parties.

To be clear, providing information and data will not suffice to create a European democracy or make citizens genuinely interested in European parties. This requires a broader reform of our Union and electoral law.

However, transparency is a clear precondition for public trust and for the functioning of democratic institutions, and, if it wants to act on the global stage as a democracy with moral standing, the EU can be no exception to this rule.

This year, we turn 25 and are looking for 2,500 new supporting members to take their stake in EU democracy. A functioning EU relies on a well-informed public – you.