21. Getting Past the Lobby! The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU)

The EU institutions are supposed to represent the general interest of the European people at large, and yet Brussels is often described as a lobbying haven where specific interest groups can direct policy. In this chapter we will explore the ways that the private interests with the largest budgets have applied pressure to EU politicians and influenced legislation. This has ranged from targeted political campaigns to direct financial incentives. The Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU) was born out of the need to curb this influence and has, since 2005, been pushing for stricter rules in those respects. In that time there have been several significant improvements aimed at addressing the pervasive and imbalanced influence of corporate lobbies over EU decision-making. However, as shown in this chapter, the improvements often fail to go far enough and also leave critical lobbying loopholes. ALTER-EU will seek to alter the European Commission’s approach of half measures and purely reactive self-governance. We will push for all EU institutions to implement adequate safeguards to ensure that their mandate to work for the public interest is not compromised by the various lobbies that swarm Brussels.