In more than 15 years in the nonprofit world, Faustine Bas-Defossez has never seen anything like this. Sure, lawmakers have occasionally submitted written questions demanding NGOs disclose their sources of funding, and there has been isolated criticism. But those past incidents seem like minor skirmishes compared to the threat the sector is facing today.
Since last year, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) group, alongside the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE) groups, has been aiming to curb NGOs' influence over policymakers, alleging that such lobbying is an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money.
“Every week there's something new; it’s very stressful,” said Bas-Defossez, who leads the nature, health, and environment department at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), Brussels’ largest green organisation. “This has never happened before.”
Europe’s nonprofit groups were already struggling with declining public funding and an uncertain economic climate that’s making wealthy donors more hawkish and eroding purchasing power. If the political campaign against them goes unchallenged, several could be forced to shut down.
Closer scrutiny
Signs of political activity targeting nonprofits emerged last November, when the European Commission sent a stark message to over 30 NGOs: They could no longer use funds from the LIFE programme, an EU green cash pot, for advocacy. The rationale, the missive explained, was that lobbying lawmakers carried a “reputational risk.”
In January, right-leaning Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf published an investigation alleging that the European Commission’s environment department had funded climate organisations to lobby other parts of the Commission in favour of Green Deal policies.
EPP lawmakers quickly took up the tune, saying that NGOs should be required to be more transparent on their funding. Conservative parties also accused nonprofits of being politically biased towards leftist and environmental ideologies.
NGOs pushed back against the claims, saying that they correctly disclosed their sources of funding, including from the EU, and that their work was independent. Supporters say their work promotes the public good and is an important counterweight to extensive lobbying by wealthy corporations.
In Germany, Friedrich Merz, the presumptive next chancellor, has questioned the outgoing Social Democrat-led government on whether state-funded civil society groups had political biases.
For Bas-Defossez, it’s all about payback: “One thing they [the conservative parties] didn’t digest is the Nature Restoration Law,” she said, pointing to the role civil society played in pushing through the controversial regulation in the face of fierce opposition from the EPP and other right-wing groups.
This week, under pressure from the EPP, the European Commission said in relation to LIFE funding that “in some cases work programmes submitted by the NGOs and annexed to the operating grant agreements contained specific advocacy actions and undue lobbying activities.” It pledged to improve safeguards in the future.
That concession prompted a climbdown from the EPP, which had been pushing for legislation to more comprehensively curb EU payments to NGOs. That could be a death sentence for smaller NGOs, with some of them relying on such grants for as much as 70% of their annual funding.
Shrinking cash pots
Heightened political scrutiny is far from the only threat looming over Europe’s nonprofit sector. By design, NGOs rely heavily on public funding alongside private donations, making them particularly vulnerable to political shifts.
Sharp cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Donald Trump have put further pressure on European NGOs, many of which received USAID funding. The new US administration has stopped billions of dollars worth of “wasteful” USAID programmes, particularly those supporting causes deemed to be “woke.”
“There's nothing comparable that has happened in the past,” said Georg von Schnurbein, an associate professor of foundation management at the University of Basel. He predicts a wave of consolidation for the sector: “They cannot rely on receiving the same funding they once did.”
In 2021, the US government was the second-largest funder of Brussels-based civil society groups, according to investigative outlet Follow the Money. The same group calculated that US funding rose by 41% in 2023, with 11% of that coming from the USAID budget.
European governments have also been cutting back. Sweden — once one of the world’s largest donors to humanitarian aid — announced last year that it would terminate all funding agreements with national nonprofits by 2024, following a shift in its development goals under a right-wing government. More recently the Netherlands, now governed by a right-wing coalition led by Dick Schoof, has unveiled fresh cuts to nonprofit funding.
Other major donors with moderate governments are scaling back their funding for NGOs. Under its multibillion-euro budget curb for 2025, France is planning to slash its development aid by nearly 40% year on year. Germany — the world’s second-largest humanitarian donor — announced last year that it is preparing to cut aid funding by half.
Then there’s philanthropic money, which has surged over the past three decades, with assets in private foundations climbing from $165 billion in 1991 to over $1.2 trillion in 2022. Yet despite this steep growth, experts warn that private donations can never fully replace shrinking public funds for nonprofits.
“The scale is just different,” noted Von Schnurbein, arguing that private giving “will never be able to replace what has now been lost.” Case in point: in 2023, USAID distributed $16.2 billion, whereas the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — one of the world’s wealthiest foundations — contributed just $6.23 billion.
But there’s also another factor that makes relying on private donations so unreliable. As political winds shift, the world’s richest men could seek to please those in power by cutting donations to causes that are no longer in line with the new political priorities.
The EU got a taste of this just weeks ago when Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates-funded umbrella organisation, abruptly shut down its lobbying operations in Washington and Brussels. That may have been an attempt to restore Gates' standing with Trump after he donated $50 million to a nonprofit supporting the Democrats in last year’s election.
New approach needed
The current force and scope of the attack against NGOs may be unprecedented, but some observers believe the clampdown on NGOs has been years in the making. “The space left to civil society has been shrinking for a decade,” Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at the HEC Paris Business School and founder of The Good Lobby, an advocacy group, told The Parliament.
He said that if politicians are serious about defending nonprofits’ role in the democratic process, they must explore alternative funding solutions to make these organisations more resilient and less susceptible to political shifts.
Chloé Mikolajczak, a Brussels-based climate and social justice activist, views the backlash as a wake-up call for civil society to act more cohesively. “We need to work together much better and that means NGOs with activists, researchers and progressive businesses,” she said. “That’s what’s going to make us stronger.”
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