MEPs reject call to halt funding for environmental NGOs 

The European People's Party (EPP) group’s campaign to block EU financial support for non-profit environmental groups has taken a blow after a trio of conservative lawmakers broke ranks and voted down a motion to censure the European Commission over its use of public funds. 

The motion was jointly tabled by Dutch lawmaker Sander Smit of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), who sits with the EPP in the European Parliament, and the eurosceptic ECR group member Pietro Fiocchi, of Italian premier Giorgia Meloni’s populist Fratelli d’Italia party.

It asserted that the EU executive “failed to provide adequate safeguards to uphold the institutional balance in the Union by allowing the targeted lobbying of Members of the European Parliament on instruction of the Commission”. 

The environment committee rejected the objection by 41 votes to 40 on Monday evening (31 March) after three EPP lawmakers – Radan Kanev, Ingeborg Ter Laak and Dimitris Tsiodras – broke ranks and voted against the motion. Another two group members abstained. 

Otherwise, the vote was split along clear party lines, with the EPP/ECR motion enjoying the unanimous support of far-right and nationalist lawmakers, while the Socialists & Democrats, liberal Renew, Greens and The Left voted against. 

The committee subsequently rejected by a wider margin a substantively similar motion tabled by French nationalist Mathilde Androuët, a member of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party who sits in the ranks of the Patriots for Europe Group. 

There were half a dozen EPP lawmakers, including Smit, among the 30 lawmakers who supported Androuët’s motion. 

‘Vaudeville’

In another twist, Smit blamed the EU executive for the debacle, accusing it of reneging on an agreement to read out at the committee meeting a statement admitting misuse of LIFE Programme environmental funds in exchange for the EPP dropping its objection. 

“We had a deal in which the European Commission would finally admit abuses surrounding the green lobby scandal...and rule them out for the future, but DG Environment refused to read the entire statement,” the Dutch lawmaker said on social media after the vote. 

“Now the fight for EU NGO transparency really begins,” Smit said. 

The rejection of the two proposals may come as a relief to the European Commission.  

It is not legally bound to follow the outcome of such votes - in the case of genetically modified crop authorisations, it routinely ignores them - but it may have had to decide whether or not to abide by the wishes of the parliament over a high-profile and controversial issue. 

The European Environmental Bureau – among the 34 non-profit groups that were awarded LIFE funding last year, and one of eight that received the maximum €700,000 – was scathing, describing the committee meeting as “low-level vaudeville” that was “as absurd as the objection it debated”. 

“The Commission needs to clearly stand up against this disinformation campaign and the fabricated scandal behind it,” the group’s policy director Faustine Bas-Defossez said, having earlier described the EPP’s campaign as a “political attempt to silence civil society and dismantle democratic oversight”. 

The EPP’s contention is that the European Commission had used the LIFE programme to pay NGOs to lobby MEPs on its behalf – a claim for which it has published no convincing evidence, although it did succeed in pressuring the EU executive to review guidelines on the use of funds.  

In an ironic twist, it became apparent earlier thisyear that one of the key figures behind the push to disallow EU support for civil society groups, Monika Hohlmeier (Germany/EPP), had a lucrative side job in a private company that received €6.5 million from the LIFE Programme in 2022, well in excess of the €700,000 cap on operating grants to individual NGOs. 

Opponents see efforts of the EPP and it’s right-wing allies as a populist campaign to silence a source of consistent and vocal criticism of their lawmakers’ stance on environmental issues.

Tiemo Wölken, the Socialists & Democrats environment policy coordinator said the vote was just the latest move in a “reckless political campaign by the EPP and their far right allies to gag civil society”. 

“The objections tabled today by the EPP and the far right in the ENVI committee clearly show their willingness to follow Donald Trump’s dangerous footsteps in undermining democracy by weakening civil society,” Wölken said. 

Of the LIFE Programme’s €771m annual budget, approximately €15m is allocated to NGOs.