A quarter of private funds donated to political parties in the EU has gone to far-right, far-left and populist movements, boosting their finances by millions of euros ahead of crucial European Parliament elections next week.
With opinion polls predicting a rise in support for hard-line conservative, eurosceptic and pro-Russian parties, the Guardian and 26 other media partners, led by research group Follow the Money, have published “The Transparency Gap”, the most thorough analysis to date of EU political finance.
The data was collected from annual reports of more than 200 political parties in 25 countries.
This is equivalent to €150 million (£128 million). Of all private donations made between 2019 and 2022, 1 in 4 euros went to populist parties or parties with the most extreme political views.
Far-right groups have raised more than 97 million euros, equivalent to 1 in every 7 euros of private funding.
The project uses the same party classification as the research group The Populist, which defines the far-right as having a nationalist and authoritarian ideology.
Most countries require political parties to declare their total income from private and public funding, but rules vary widely and funding is a “black box” in some member states: three-quarters of countries either do not publish any information at all or only partial data about the identities of the individuals and companies behind donors.
Even when parties follow their country’s rules, transparency gaps exist: while the investigation found no signs of wrongdoing, a major study commissioned by the European Parliament into party financing concluded that a lack of transparency could lead to corruption risks.
“All EU member states have adopted regulations on reporting and disclosing donations, but what must be reported and what must be disclosed varies widely…There is often a significant gap between low standards for reporting and high standards for disclosure, with the average threshold of €2,400 carrying potential corruption risks,” the report said.
“There’s nothing that prevents political parties from publishing more detailed information than is required by law,” said Fernando Casal Bertoa, an expert on European parties and political institutions and an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Nottingham, “but very few parties do so.”
“Political parties are not interested in transparency; they think it will limit them,” he said.
According to the data, if other forms of funding are included, namely donations from party members, politicians and officials, hard-line and populist parties will receive a fifth of all funding raised between 2019 and 2022, or around 500 million euros. For far-right parties, the figure is closer to 200 million euros, or 1 in 11 euros.
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Transparency Gap Methodology
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Investigative journalism outlet Follow the Money collated financial reports and accounts of 200 political parties across 27 EU member states. The Guardian independently verified the data and coordinated its analysis with journalists in each country.
The analysis uses party designations (far-right, far-left, populist, eurosceptic) as defined by The PopuList, an academic research group that analyses and classifies European political parties for the period up to 2022.
Relevant parties were defined as those deemed relevant at a national level, such as those that currently have representatives in the European Parliament, those likely to field candidates in next month’s elections, or those with a certain number of seats in each country’s parliament.
The analysis covers the years 2019 to 2022. 2023 is not included in the analysis as many parties have not yet released their manifestos.
We use the term non-public funding to describe funding raised from private sources, including:
– Private donations from individuals, businesses and other organisations.
– Membership fees.
– Donations from politicians and party officials.
The non-public funding category does not include:
– Because there is no uniformity across countries and political parties, money raised from dinners, auctions, merchandise and lottery sales, income from real estate assets, etc. are classified as “other” donations.
– Financing from donors, banks and other banking products.
– Funding provided by the state, usually based on the number of seats each party holds in parliament.
In an article titled “France’s political donations shift to the right,” income classified as “other,” such as fundraising events, could be included in the category of undisclosed donations.
Italian membership dues are excluded from the country analysis due to inconsistencies in how parties report this income.
Two countries were excluded In Austria, the regional nature of party disclosure meant that universal figures could not be recorded with any certainty.
In Lithuania, political parties are not required to report annual financial statements.
In France, three parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum – Leconquet and Marine Le Pen’s Rally National on the right, and Insubordinate France on the left – have seen a dramatic increase in financial support.
These three parties received just 13% of the private funds raised in France in 2019, but their share will reach 38% in 2022 when Emmanuel Macron and Le Pen face off in the presidential runoff election.
Non-public funds include funds from donors, fees from party members, and contributions from party candidates and officials. They do not include funds from the state, loans from donors, fundraising events, merchandise, profits from real estate holdings, or other income.
In Latvia, which is expected to see a surge in anti-European and populist MEPs next month, non-public funding to these parties has increased from 9 percent to 36 percent over four years, mainly driven by the center-right populist Latvia First party.
The analysis found that far-right, far-left and populist parties together raised more than half of all non-public funding. Slovenia, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Portugal, Greece.
Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party, which has been in power for 14 years and has overseen cuts to state funding, has received 55% of all non-public funding in 2022.
Nationalist and far-right parties are expected to come first in Hungary and eight other EU member states, including Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, according to the poll.
At a far-right rally in Madrid earlier this month, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a video message calling on “patriots to occupy Brussels” and saying lawmakers there were responsible for “unleashing hordes of illegal immigrants” and “poisoning children with gender propaganda.”
In Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki’s far-right Law and Justice party (a close ally of Fidesz), which was the ruling party until April this year, received 44 percent of non-public funds. 2022.
In Italy, four populist parties including Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League – both on the right of the political spectrum – along with Forza Italia and the Five Star Movement have secured 55% of non-public funding in 2022, according to the data.
In some countries, far-left parties dominate: the Greek Communist Party receives more than half of the country’s non-public funding, while in Portugal its rival, the Portuguese Communist Party, receives more than 50 percent of the total.
In most countries, government funding is now the most important source of revenue, but non-public funding accounts for less than a quarter of available funds in Spain, Hungary and Portugal, and around 15 percent in Ireland and Belgium.
In other countries where private funding dominates, government donations still make up a large proportion: in Germany and the Netherlands, for example, around 45% of the funding received by political parties in 2022 was publicly funded.
Since a landmark ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court in 1992, the allocation of public funds to political parties has been based on their “social roots”.
“This means that political parties must constantly seek the support of the people,” the German official said.