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When it comes to guarding against corruption, for the European Parliament it’s one standard for everybody else, and another for the members of the chamber itself.
Since taking office in 2019, MEPs have legislated whistleblower protections for workers across the EU — but failed to apply them to their own staff.
They’ve excoriated the ride-sharing company Uber for recruiting a former European commissioner to lobby her former colleagues shortly after she left office — but declined to subject themselves to a similar “cooling-off period.”
They’ve rejected a Commission nominee, Sylvie Goulard, over a well-paid side job and use of a parliamentary assistant for domestic political work — but didn’t find either of those to be enough of a problem to disqualify her from being an MEP.
Now, as the shockwaves of the Qatargate scandal subside, the Parliament seems intent on making sure its cozy relationship with what one lawmaker called the EU’s “petty, everyday corruption” emerges unscathed — that the blowback is contained to a small circle of individuals and doesn’t threaten business as usual.
MEPs are getting ready to consider a series of proposals designed to “put sand in the gears” of the illicit influence machine. Much of the 14-point plan — widely leaked but still not formally published by Parliament President Roberta Metsola — would bring the Parliament in line with rules already in force in the Commission, including a “cooling off period” before ex-MEPs can lobby their former colleagues and mandatory entry in a transparency database for all lobbyists entering the premises.
For the Parliament’s veterans, these ideas will look familiar. They’ve been proposed in the past, only to be blocked by MEPs arguing that accountability measures risk undermining the will of the voters. In contrast to the unelected bureaucrats in the Commission, they argue, parliamentarians’ freedom of mandate is sacrosanct.
“The reckoning? It absolutely doesn’t exist,” said Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, a French lawmaker for the Greens. She compared the 705-member chamber to a sick body rejecting medical treatment — treatment which she says should extend to protections for whistleblowers, new transparency requirements for meeting lobbyists and requirements to report how lawmakers’ allowances are spent.
“There has been, instead, a reaction like a sick body — there is a desire to lock everything down, to not look, to not talk about it,” she said. Meanwhile, in Brussels’ other key institutions, the European Commission and the Council, officials have already declared that the Qatargate scandal does not concern them — and so no changes are needed.
The EU’s immune reaction suggests Brussels is suffering from a severe case of “glass house” syndrome, said Delbos-Corfield. Experts at finger-pointing and binding rules on other bodies, the bloc’s officials have little interest in taking the tough medicine themselves.
‘Make or break’
Some hope Qatargate will be the near-death experience that scares the patient into shaping up.
“There’ve been smaller scandals and smaller reforms, but there’s never been a moment when the future of the institution itself was in peril because of the nature and the size of the scandal,” said Michiel Van Hulten, director of Transparency International EU, who spoke with MEPs abuzz with about the allegations in the corridors of the Strasbourg seat last week. “Qatargate has changed that.”
Foremost among the converted: European Parliament President Metsola, who is winning praise from some transparency campaigners for proposing an ambitious set of quick-hit reforms.
While Metsola initially tried to deflect attention away from MEPs’ own behavior by casting the scandal as an “attack” on the EU by foreign invaders, “she’s since rectified that.” Metsola is “more serious about internal reform than any of her predecessors,” said van Hulten.
Metsola will have to overcome powerful opponents in her own center-right political group, the European People’s Party.
“This is kind of a make-or-break moment,” said Van Hulten. If Metsola “sticks her neck out and is willing to make some enemies, including within her own party,” Parliament could see real change. If not, he continued, “It’s hard to see how anything meaningful” happens.
The chamber’s history doesn’t offer much reason for van Hulten’s hope. Before the last European Parliament election in 2019, the Parliament adopted a set of transparency rules with much fanfare.
The way the rules were adopted, however, was less than transparent. The meatiest paragraph of the measure — a requirement for committee chairs and rapporteurs to disclose their meetings with interest groups — was adopted by secret ballot. An anonymous set of 220 MEPs voted against it.
An even bigger cohort voted against a paragraph that urged — but did not require — all MEPs to refuse to meet with lobbyists not listed in the Transparency Register, an online database of lobbyists, trade associations and NGOs trying to influence EU policy.
‘They don’t care’
Once adopted, however, the rules weren’t enforced.
The Parliament did start negotiating with the Commission and Council to adopt a “mandatory” Transparency Register. Officially, the Parliament agreed to bar interest groups not in the database from entering the premises — a policy that critics say leaves considerable wiggle room.
And yet, Fight Impunity, the NGO headed by Pier Antonio Panzeri, the former MEP at the heart of the scandal, was able to present reports in the Parliament and even team up with the in-house think tank despite the fact that it never signed up to the register.
Polish EPP MEP Danuta Hübner, the rapporteur on the mandatory Transparency Register, said the Parliament has an admirable set of safeguards against undue influence. However, she acknowledged MEPs often flout the rules. “There’s no awareness among members of the European Parliament,” she said.
“Also, maybe we are not perfect on implementation,” she added. “Maybe some, they don’t care.”
More recently, the Parliament is in a blame game with the other institutions over long-stalled negotiations over an independent ethics cop.
“It is very critical to have not only strong rules but the same rules covering all the EU institutions and not to allow for any exemptions,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said days after the Qatargate scandal broke.
Insiders read that last clause as code: It’s got to apply to Parliament, too.
Technically, the Parliament did adopt a nonbinding resolution calling for the ethics body. But Commission officials grumble privately that the Parliament is resisting any design that would apply to the chamber.
That resistance is perhaps best embodied by Rainer Wieland, a German MEP and one of the Parliament’s 14 vice presidents. As a member of the Parliament’s rule-making Bureau, as well as committees related to the budget and constitutional affairs, Wieland holds outsized sway on how the institution functions.
The European People’s Party backs an ethics body with an “advisory role to raise awareness and provide guidance for Members of the participating institutions,” Wieland wrote in a 2021 email to POLITICO.
“We will oppose all attempts to establish rules that interfere with the free mandate and endanger independent parliamentarianism,” Wieland said in the 2021 email.
In a statement Wednesday, Wieland backed reviewing existing rules to see if such a scandal could be avoided going forward.
“However, what is also clear to me is that we do not need more of what could not prevent the current scandal,” he said, urging letting the investigation by Belgian authorities play out first.
He added, “It is interesting to observe that there has always been — and still is — reluctance to focus on NGOs and their funding.”
‘A few bad apples’
Wieland is perhaps the most visible and unabashed defender of the Parliament’s autonomy, but he’s far from alone in his skepticism about the need for ethics overhaul.
During her campaign to replace Eva Kaili — the Greek socialist MEP in jail on accusations of corruption — as one of the Parliament’s 14 vice presidents, Delbos-Corfield said she had approached the S&D and Renew groups for a debate about anti-corruption reforms.
No one was interested. She lost the race to Luxembourgish S&D lawmaker Marc Angel. “The general response from the Parliament is: This is just a few bad apples. The scandal will pass and we can carry on as before.”
While resistance to change was widespread, Delbos-Corfield said it was particularly ingrained in some members of the AFCO committee on constitutional affairs, which is charged with implementing changes to Parliament’s procedures. “In their view, there can be no constraints on lawmakers. So they refuse anything that is binding. By extension, they block anything that could allow parliamentary assistants to speak out,” she said.
Above all, the charge that sticks not just to the European Parliament but all EU institutions is hypocrisy, Delbos-Corfield said. While EU officials demand that the rule of law be respected in other countries and that whistleblowers be protected in corporations, they bristle at similar scrutiny of their own affairs. “We’re very good at demanding things from corporations that we don’t want to apply to ourselves,” she added. “We’ve created a European prosecutor. We are keeping watch over heads of state, we are keeping watch over their next of kin. And we wouldn’t keep watch over ourselves?”
Indeed, just this summer, the so-called Uber Files leaks highlighted the Commission’s inability to enforce lobbying rules for Commissioners after they leave office. And von der Leyen’s efforts to secure coronavirus vaccines have come under heavy scrutiny, with the European Ombudsman calling the failure to reveal her text messages with a pharma executive “maladministration” and the European Public Prosecutor launching a probe focused on her actions.
And if MEPs are living in a glass house, the Council is known as a “black box.” Only a sliver of Council staffers are subject to the mandatory Transparency Register agreement, for example.
“The Council is a different institution,” said Lars Danielsson, Sweden’s permanent representative, in an interview earlier this month, noting that diplomats are subject to their own national rules.
“Do we need to do anything else?” he said. “Not that I can see right now.”
‘So boring’
For lobbyists, used to being stigmatized as secretive influence peddlers, there’s some satisfaction in seeing lawmakers squinting in the glaring lights.
Connor Allen, an auto lobbyist, said he flirted with the idea of publishing all his meetings on an external website. “I was straight up told by many MEPs/offices that they just will not meet with me if I do that,” he tweeted. (Allen declined to identify those offices.)
The (legal) influence industry has pretty much adjusted to the idea that they have to disclose their activities, said Paul Varakas, a cigar lobbyist who serves as president of the Society of European Affairs Professionals, which advocates for transparency standards.
“You will see that, mostly, the people that are against the change are not necessarily lobbyists,” he said. “They are more the politicians; they are afraid to justify their choice.”
There’s also, quite simply, the hassle of transparency.
The right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists support Metsola’s overhaul plan, said Belgian MEP Assita Kanko, a vice chair of the group. But, she added, balance is needed to avoid excessive bureaucracy — and scare off competent lawmakers.
“I’m worried,” she added, “that it will become so boring and so bad to become a member [of Parliament] that people who become a member cannot do anything else.”
Eddy Wax and Lili Bayer contributed reporting.
