November 2024
After almost 20 years, the Alliance for Lobby Transparency and Ethics Regulation in the EU (ALTER-EU) has ceased to exist.
ALTER-EU was launched in 2005 when Commissioner Siim Kallas took Brussels by surprise and proposed to set up a lobby register, an idea that instantly faced a heavy backlash from corporate lobbyists and parts of the European Commission. In the following years, ALTER-EU was a key player in securing slow but crucial progress towards an EU lobby transparency register with teeth.
ALTER-EU also ran impactful campaigns for improved revolving door rules for Commissioners and EU staff, for strong ethics rules for MEPs, and for measures to tackle the industry dominance of Commission advisory groups (the so-called 'expert groups').
By 2015 we could conclude that “lobby transparency and the need to preserve ethics and tackle conflicts of interest are on the agenda of the EU institutions”, but also that “none of the problems were tackled with the political will needed to actually resolve them” and that “the capture of decision-making by vested economic interests continues unchecked.”
After the 2010 book “Bursting the Brussels Bubble”, in 2018 ALTER-EU published a second book: “Corporate capture in Europe - When big business dominates policy-making and threatens our rights”. The book zoomed in on what corporate capture looks like in policy areas such as banking, energy, and medicines, and made recommendations for how to roll back excessive corporate power, for instance by tackling the massive imbalance in who gets meetings with Commission officials.
It’s a fact of life that civil society coalitions don’t live forever, but rest assured that campaigning for reining in excessive corporate lobbying power will continue forcefully after ALTER-EU closes down. That includes campaigning by the most active ALTER-EU member groups such as LobbyControl, Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, Greenpeace EU, and AccessInfo Europe, in cooperation with dozens of other NGOs and trade unions. Additional groundbreaking work is also being done by coalitions like Fossil Free Politics and LobbyLeaks, and initiatives targeting the tobacco industry and producers of toxic chemicals are gaining momentum.
Thank you for all your support and follow the links to support campaigns for a corporate capture-free EU!
For specific questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Olivier Hoedeman (olivier[at]corporateeurope.org) or Nina Katzemich (nina.katzemich[at]lobbycontrol.de)