Not quite, yet Brussels' lobbying landscape remains largely elusive to citizens beyond the European capital. In reality, lobbying is a massive industry that drives the political machinery of the EU. While it is not all bad, we do need more transparency.

Lobbying, it seems, makes Brussels go round. According to LobbyControl, an NGO advocating for greater transparency in policy-making, over 12,000 organisations seek to influence the EU institutions, employing some 29,000 lobbyists (that's almost as many people as the entire staff of the European Commission). Last year, these organisations spent around €1.3 billion on their advocacy and outreach activities.

Lobbying is all about getting your point across in the right way to the right people. Europe's lobbyists use various persuasion techniques, from face-to-face meetings with officials in the Commission, Parliament and member states, to media outreach, position papers, commissioned research studies, and targeted advertising.

Lobbying in Brussels is so pervasive that the ads that line the EU quarter's metro station walls are more likely to promote corporations' views on the Green Deal than the shampoo or shoes they're selling.

Lobbying, of course, isn't all bad. It helps policy-makers gather input from a broad range of stakeholders to figure out what's best for society and make informed decisions.

To take automotive policy as an example, the European Commission uses carmakers' expertise in technical working groups on everything from parking area safety to those infamous carbon emission standards. Things go awry, however, when lobbying goes unchecked, and certain interest groups are privileged over others.

”The mere activity of lobbying doesn't have to be a bad thing”, explains Ilaria Schmoland, Policy Assistant at Transparency International EU, an anti-corruption watchdog (and itself a lobby group). ”But it must be transparent. We need real accountability mechanisms to ensure that lobbying happens in a way that excludes any sort of undue influence, regulatory capture or conflict of interest.”

Unfortunately, ”the lobbying architecture of the EU is incomplete”, Raphaël Kergueno, Senior Policy Officer at Transparency International, tells The European Correspondent. ”We don't have the necessary data and lack the tools to enforce the rules that do exist. In other words, the lobbying that we do know about may just be the tip of the iceberg.”

At the Commission, lobbyists' interactions with non-cabinet officials remain unreported. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) can also meet with groups not listed on the EU's official Transparency Register, a database of organisations that lobby the EU. At the Council, there is no mandatory special interest meeting registration – and thus no transparency at all. Crucially, the EU has hired only eleven people to monitor the thousands of interactions between special interest representatives and its officials.

Importantly, merely meeting with a special interest group doesn't mean that the demands of that group also influence the officials in question. But the more access an organisation has, the more likely it will succeed in making its case.

Just look at the Green Deal: few topics have attracted as many lobbyists as Brussels' green transition. Two-thirds of the Commissions' high-level interactions on the Green Deal are with corporate interest groups, while only a quarter of meetings are held with non-commercial groups. This imbalance is reflected at the very top of EU politics: four out of every five meetings held by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are with business groups, while less than 20% of her time goes to civil society organisations.

And yes, at least in theory, citizens can have their say in European policy-making as well. While naturally excluded from the definition of a ‘lobbyist', they can reply to public consultations, contact their MEPs, or start so-called European Citizens Initiatives, through which petitions with over a million signatures are taken up by the Commission. But none of these initiatives really have led to tangible outcomes so far.

Democratising EU policy-making ”remains a bit of a golden goose debate”, agrees Kergueno. ”No one has found the right approach yet. But the more transparency and information we have, the more citizens can be involved.”

Yet even if we had such increased transparency, we'd probably need more. The EU's long-promised interinstitutional ethics body, for example, which was finally announced this year, doesn't nearly have the kind of independent monitoring, oversight and sanctioning powers needed for fully transparent and balanced policy-making. As long as the EU's top brass lack the courage to put more stringent guardrails on who they're influenced by, citizens can try all they want to weigh in on EU policy-making, but going up against the sheer might of corporate lobby groups is likely to remain a David and Goliath kind of story.