…but it smells funny

Across Europe, the space for civil society is shrinking, facing a multi-pronged attack that aims to limit its freedoms and its ability to participate in democracy.

We will first break down three distinct ways democratic forces are weakened in Europe: attacks on NGO funding, omnibus deregulation and reduced options to engage citizens to participate. After that, we’ll look at how civil society groups can work together better to fight back.

We are aware this isn’t just a European problem. We’re seeing similar tactics play out globally, from the U.S. to many EU countries, showing a worrying trend worldwide. By understanding what’s happening elsewhere and teaming up progressive forces here, we can learn from these global struggles and prevent further damage to our democracies before it’s too late.

Shrinking civic space

We aren’t implying these attacks are coordinated by some hidden powers, but they are reinforcing each other, no matter if it’s intentional or not.

Defund NGOs

There is a concerted effort by MEPs from the EPP, the ECR and some far right to scrutinise and potentially curtail the funding of NGOs by the European Commission, particularly through programs like LIFE. Here’s a quick summary of the core allegations:

• EPP and ECR MEPs, notably Tomáš Zdechovský (EPP spokesman on Budgetary Control) and Monika Hohlmeier (EPP), argue that there’s a lack of transparency surrounding NGO funding. They claim the European Commission has “secretly funded NGOs to lobby the European Parliament or to lobby against its legislative proposals.”
• A key accusation is that the Commission has financed “undue lobbying activities” by NGOs, specifically alleging that LIFE program contracts might have instructed NGOs to lobby MEPs or other Commission Directorates in favor of the Commission’s environmental agenda. They refer to this as a “shadow lobby” or “manipulation” of EU funds.
• Recent allegations in Welt Am Sonntag claimed the EU executive secretly paid environmental NGOs up to €700,000 to promote the bloc’s climate policy, fueling calls for an investigative inquiry committee into this “Green Gate” scandal.
• Another talking point is that taxpayer money is being used to fund an “ideologically driven agenda” and want to ensure accountability and proper control of spending.
• They are pushing for further and stronger action, including systematically looking into contracts between the European Commission and NGOs, and have attempted to establish an investigative inquiry committee into NGO financing.

These are proven falsehoods, including the European Court of Auditors (ECA) that reported “no evidence of wrongdoing”, but crucially, their press release focussed on minor issues and buried the positive points. Many media covered these smear campaigns with very little space to balance and push back to support NGOs.

So far, that false narrative of “lack of transparency” has been much more successful to spread outside of the EU bubble than the debunking.

The “Omnibus” Regulation weaken social and environmental protections

The European Commission’s “Omnibus” regulation project, presented as a way to simplify EU sustainability rules and cut red tape for businesses. NGOs and Trade Unions know that this means it will weaken social and environmental protections across Europe.

One of the “Omnibus” is to streamline key sustainability laws like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The stated goal is to reduce reporting burdens on companies, especially smaller ones. This simplification comes at a cost. The proposal suggests raising thresholds for which companies have to report their environmental and social impacts, meaning fewer businesses would be under scrutiny. It could also limit how far companies need to investigate their supply chains for human rights abuses or environmental damage, potentially letting them off the hook for issues deeper down the line. Beyond that, there are concerns it might weaken civil liability rules, making it tougher for victims of corporate misconduct to get justice in court, and could lead to delayed deadlines for compliance and less frequent reporting requirements.

Essentially, while framed as a common-sense simplification, the “Omnibus” project is a significant rollback of hard-won progress in corporate accountability, social and environmental protection. It will undermine or weaken the EU’s own Green Deal goals and sends a worrying signal about the EU commitment to a truly sustainable future.

EU institutions restricts organised civil participation

It’s getting tougher for NGOs to rally their supporters, thanks to a series of subtle but effective moves by EU institutions.

Pretty much every existing official tool aiming to let citizens participate, like EC consultations or European Citizen Initiative have usability issues and are inferior to the tool designed for and by NGOs. This is partially because institutions aren’t great at IT in general, but there are more important factors: their incentives aren’t aligned. While NGOs try to maximise engagement and empower their supporters to promote the campaign further, the institutions will focus more on making it easier for themselves to process the results, to optimise to the needs of those they interact with the most: member states, professional lobbyists or other institutions. Any citizen that tries to contribute to a consultation knows it’s not meant for them but for lobbyists that already have their ECAS account.

But the biggest issue is probably that these tools are designed to remove CSOs from the action. They make it impossible for NGOs to keep the contact details of the supporters they convinced to participate, undermining their capacity to grow and strengthen their members base. They went further and for instance removed the option for NGOs to self-host European Citizen Initiatives. This was a vital tool, allowing NGOs to directly engage their base and successfully campaign on issues important to them while growing their list of supporters or individual donors.

Beside these official tools for participations, there are also the many campaign and advocacy tactics used like petitions, writing or calling MEPs or officials and other mobilisation. Here, we are already seeing the negative effect of the right and far right campaign against “undue lobbying”: while the Commission publicly defends its funding and monitoring processes, behind the scenes, they are asking NGOs that receive EU funds to downplay the advocacy work they’re planning as part of funded projects. This also makes it harder for supporters to see and engage with crucial campaigns.

The treaties make it explicit that the EU institutions must give citizens and representative associations the opportunity to make their views known on EU policies, but fail short on understanding that NGOs must be able to grow their list of members to be able to support themselves and fulfill their role.

These actions reflect a natural tendency for institutions to distance themselves from critical voices and citizen scrutiny. The current political climate only seems to be fueling these isolating tendencies, making it even harder for NGOs to connect with and empower their communities. The issue is compounded by the inertia of the system and it means everything lost will take years and tremendous effort to get back, even if/when a better political climate arises.

Fight the autocratic drift

NGOs in Brussels have resisted autocratic trends to weaken counterpowers and tried but ultimately failed to block threats like the proposed investigation committee and tried to expose the lies. But now, it’s time to shift from defense to offense: reshaping the narrative around their role, funding, and pushing back against deregulation and weakening standards in the EU.

We must harness NGOs’ ability to engage millions online; informing citizens, amplifying their voices, and collectively reclaiming civic space to restore a democracy that actively welcomes public participation, especially with the many NGOs with an audience that wouldn’t naturally follow what is happening at the EU level.

To counter NGO defunding and the Omnibus deregulation, we propose two tactics rooted in a shared strategy: decentralized online actions, loosely coordinated and supported by common technical infrastructure.

History shows that top-down, Brussels-led campaigns fail to meaningfully engage Europeans. Success requires local and national NGOs to bridge the gap; translating EU policies into relatable terms, connecting them to grassroots realities, and mobilizing their communities to care and act.

We’ve supported hundreds of multi-NGO campaigns around unified goals. By decentralizing efforts; letting each organization adapt messaging, language, and tactics to their audience; we’ve driven 15 million actions (petitions, emails to MEPs, etc.). We know how to make it work and have built the infrastructure needed.

Online campaigns alone won’t fix systemic threats, but they’re a fast and cost-effective stepping stone to broader tactics: face-to-face advocacy, media stunts, or even nonviolent civil disobedience. Alone, digital campaigns won’t dismantle systemic threats; but they are the scaffolding for lasting change. Their true power lies in three transformative effects:

1. Breaking the Brussels Bubble

Most Europeans encounter EU policymaking only through the distorted lens of headlines or political spin. Decentralized online campaigns cut through the noise, delivering explanations from trusted local NGOs of how arcane legislation; like the Omnibus deregulation; threatens local hospitals, rivers, or labor rights. This isn’t just awareness; it’s democratizing access to the EU’s opaque machinery.

2. Entry to the engagement ladder

Every new supporter is a potential donor, volunteer, or future activist. A well-run digital campaign doesn’t just rack up signatures -it converts passive audiences into financial backers (critical as public funding shrinks) and recruits for high-engagement tactics.

3. The Coalition Effect

When NGOs from Warsaw to Lisbon campaign in unison; even with their tailored messages; they create something rare: a pan-European counterweight to centralized autocratic drift. Shared tools and metrics foster trust; joint victories teach disparate groups how to collaborate. This isn’t just solidarity; it’s institutional muscle memory for democracy’s next crisis.

Let’s see how to apply that to the threats described above.

Campaigns

Campaign 1: Fighting “defund NGOs”

The attack on the NGO financing is effective because it’s hard to mobilise citizens on it. “No one” knows about these funds, why it’s needed and most don’t care. The argument one step removed about how it’s an attack on democracy might have a slightly wider appeal, but it’s unlikely to resonate with a big part of the European population, or even with many NGOs that are focusing on their vertical topics and that are unlikely to join and campaign.

What we think is the best angle is to use the attacker’s weapon and turn it against them and lean heavily on their demand for more transparency. Or rather use their call for more transparency to highlight their hypocrisy.

One first demand could be that instead of only focusing on the ~2% of the budget that goes to NGOs, they should investigate as well the 98% that go to companies, possibly some that have financial ties with them <to find the ref>.

Or ask what is their view about the General Expenditure Allowance (GEA) and the 4k€ each of them receive monthly, without any receipt or breakdown, costing more than €35 million annually to EU citizens without any transparency.

But more importantly, we should campaign -and ask them to campaign- for more transparency on all the topics we care about and where more transparency would be beneficial to all, like

• stronger Transparency Register
• Each speaker in an event in the EP should have their organisation registered in the TR
• Publication of all meetings for MEPs
• All plenary votes on rollcalls (each mep vote public)
• Rollcalls on votes in committees
• More transparency in the trialogue
• Council (endless list of demands here ;)
• Pfizer Gate
• Side Jobs of MEPs (eg. Rachida Daty)
• …

This list is not meant to be exhaustive (by far), but every NGO in Brussels can find some points where transparency would help their advocacy work, and - for all them that are federations or part of a broader network of national NGO- identify a palette of demands that their members could campaign on and engage with their supporters in their country.

In practice, we can implement it as a distributed mail to MEPs campaign (targeting MEPs that are peddling lies about NGO funding for instance): each regional, national or european NGO can add on their website a tool to allow their supporters to write an email to their MEPs to ask for more transparency in their own language and focussing on the transparency points that are the most relevant for them and their specific audiences.

We have worked with many loose coalitions of NGOs, we should embrace their capacity to come up with strange and wonderful ways to connect their issues and a global transparency demand and welcome and support that diversity. The aim isn’t to strictly control the message, but have a broad network shooting roughly the same arrows in the same direction.

And we should have that tool ready to be used and flexible enough to be fine tuned to engage thousands of supporters within hours all around Europe to send emails next time a right or far right MEP launches an attack on NGO funding in the media and plays the transparency card.

Because if we don’t know when it will happen, we know it will.

And we should be ready. We can prepare the messages, get the campaign tool ready to be added by any NGO and launched in a very short time.

Campaign 2: Rules to protect

Omnibus campaigns are inherently more complex to coordinate because they cover numerous specific issues. Finding a common message that unites diverse organizations; from privacy activists and bird watchers to climate advocates; against deregulation often results in a diluted call to action that fails to resonate with a broad audience.

Instead, we should establish a flexible, agile network capable of launching targeted campaigns on a “rule-by-rule” basis, forming ad-hoc loose coalitions as needed.

The goal is to build a network of hundreds of NGOs that can be quickly informed when a new campaign is going to launch. If an organization sees the topic as relevant to its core mission and believes it will engage its members, it can join, adapt the campaign materials, and publish them - tailoring the framing to fit its local context.

For example: If WWF and Greenpeace identify a critical moment when the Nature Restoration Law is being weakened and public pressure could help, they could issue a “call to partners”; providing campaign briefs, tactics, and existing visuals. A Romanian NGO fighting a gold mine might then join, linking the global restoration message to its local struggle and mobilising its supporters.

Of course, most NGOs focus on narrow issues and won’t join every campaign. The key isn’t to act only when there’s universal consensus but to lower the barriers for organizations to participate when an opportunity aligns with their work; amplifying campaigns with dozens of additional voices from regions and constituencies that would otherwise go uncovered.

We already have 420+ organizations using our campaign tools, so the technical infrastructure is largely in place. Each campaign should provide:

• Ready-to-use text, visuals, and email templates
• Clear guidance on core demands vs. adaptable elements
• Flexibility for partners to localize messaging

However, two major obstacles limit agile coalition-building:

1. Many NGOs have slow decision-making and lack processes to quickly approve campaigns or reallocate staff time.
2. Some campaigners don’t have enough experience with online campaigns and would need training to set up and launch campaigns efficiently.

Solutions?

• Training & practice: Regular campaigns improve speed and confidence.
• Building trust : A “social proof” network of NGOs committed to shared principles (e.g., fact-based advocacy) could streamline collaboration. In Brussels, such networks (like the Green 10) already exist, and many more informal ones.
• Get the buy in from the management/board of NGOs
• For smoother coalition campaigns, we should establish clear ground rules, such as
  • Commitment to facts and reality
  • No sharing of supporter data between partners and coordinators
  • Ready-to-use campaign assets (text, visuals, emails)
  • Freedom to adapt messaging to local contexts (e.g., avoiding “NGO” if stigmatised in a specific country)
  • GDPR-compliant but different practices (eg double opt-in is required in Germany but uncommon in Romania)
  • Minimal campaign effort by partners (eg setting up the campaign page and one mailing full list)

We know we can build that culture of campaigning together with rapid responses online actions. It has already happened organically, but we can learn from these and remove the pain points to make these loose coalitions work better and faster together.

Campaign 3: Reclaim democracy with Civil Society

This isn’t a single campaign or even multiple ones, but an enduring movement to reposition civil society as the vital component of genuine democracy. We will pursue this through sustained public engagement - mobilising millions to contact their representatives, orchestrating visible demonstrations outside the European Parliament, and creating moments of accountability at high-profile events. This is the underlying common ground between all the campaigns described in this document, and the many more that are happening.

The fundamental truth we build upon remains clear: democratic rights are never passively granted. They are claimed through persistent collective action. History shows that every democratic advance - from suffrage to civil rights - was won through organised public demand.

Our approach combines mass participation with strategic confrontation. Digital mobilisation will amplify citizen voices directly to decision-makers, while creative public actions will ensure these demands cannot be ignored. Together, these tactics reinforce civil society’s proper role - not as passive consultants or mouthpieces of the institutions but as democracy’s essential counterbalance.

The work demands constant vigilance. When corporate interests and institutional inertia threaten democratic norms, organised civil society must respond swiftly and visibly. Through coordinated pressure and uncompromising advocacy, we keep the democratic process accountable to citizens rather than power.

This is how democracy breathes: through the constant, determined engagement of its people. The alternative - a politics reduced to technical administration - is democracy in name only. Our campaign exists to prevent that hollowing out, ensuring European democracy remains alive to its founding promise of genuine self-government.

Your Input Needed

Do these points make sense? What’s missing? How can we refine this approach together? Your feedback will help shape a more effective, inclusive campaigning model; let’s discuss, and let’s campaign!

As Bertolt Brecht (might have) said: “Those who struggle may fail. Those who do not struggle have already failed”.

The triple assault on citizen’s social rights, health and environment

Democracy is like your health. You only realize how important it is to you, once you have lost it.

A diagnosis of European democracy shows there are several symptoms indicating that it is severely ill. Just like the drama unfolding in the USA, the same authoritarian scenario will happen in Europe, a take over by the far right, if nothing is done.

There are treatments, but the injections and pills to make it better cannot come from one doctor, it needs to come from us all. For that we first need to understand what’s the diagnosis and why things seem more and more hopeless and dire.

If European politicians and policymakers no longer defend your retired mother’s interests, basic democratic rights of EU citizen, the health of your children, the social rights of workers, a livable future for farmers then you know we’re in trouble.

European should urgently stop watching in awe the reckless damage Trump is causing to the US. In the EU we see similar tendencies. Similar policies are being rolled out at rapid speed.

It can all be summarized as: the vested interests of capital and corporations are all that seem to count. And big business, private profits prevail over citizens and general interests.

Three symptoms of a sick EU democracy are:

1.The EU is rolling back rules and regulations that were put in place to protect people and planet; Rules that have been democratically agreed, are being deleted and/or diluted at the wishes and demands of corporate actors.

2. The EU says it cares about the opinion of it’s citizen. But facts and research shows this is simply not true.

3. Aggressive political attacks against civil society organisations, who have a legal task to defend the general interest.