How to limit authoritarian influence in the EU – European Council on Foreign Relations

A number of corruption scandals recently shook Germany and led to the resignation of several members of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Survey results for the party ahead of the parliamentary elections in September. Some of the exposed MPs had received financial payments from authoritarian regimes such as Azerbaijan and North Macedonia to stand up for them in both Berlin and Brussels. But apart from the exposure of a shocking tendency towards corruption by elected officials – which has recently been the focus of the German media – the affairs raise broader questions about authoritarian efforts to influence German and European politics.

There is a dense network of interests between some politicians from Germany’s two traditionally largest parties, on the one hand, and authoritarian and kleptocratic regimes in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Ilham Aliyev’s Azerbaijan, on the other hand, to name just a few. This can take the form of lucrative contracts for individual politicians or by exerting influence through party groups in the European Parliament. Regardless of the type of influence, autocrats within and outside the European Union have long been able to exploit loopholes in German law and weaknesses in financial supervision to dilute European positions on democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

A widespread practice is the use of dubious “consultations” associated with MPs and former top politicians. The fees received for such activities are usually unlimited, and there is no legal obligation for MPs to report this income to the Bundestag. In many cases, parliamentarians involved in such activities got into trouble only when they tried to: Evade taxes.

One of the recent scandals involves Revelations on payments during the tenure of the former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. In 2016, Gruevski’s government hired a consulting firm from MP Tobias Zech According to reports, organizing meetings for the then Prime Minister in Berlin and Munich. This lobbying was aimed at gaining political support for the regime before the elections. It came at a time when Gruevski’s government was already known to be responsible for mass violations of democracy and human rights. It also happened after major scandals that exposed high levels of corruption and crime in his government. An example from 2015 was the Wiretapping of phone calls from 20,000 Macedonian journalists, politicians and religious figures and political interference in the judiciary, media and administration.

Gruevski’s visits to Germany therefore gave an autocrat a semblance of legitimacy; they would have undermined the efforts of the US government and the EU at the time to facilitate democratic regime change and to create the conditions for free and fair elections. The efforts of the US and the EU eventually paid off, resulted in a democratic change of government and paved the way for the historic Prespa Agreement with Greece, which changed the country’s name and cleared its entry into NATO.

Other ways of exerting influence in Germany are the establishment of organizations such as the “Environmental foundation“Founded by the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to support the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Revelations surrounding this foundation have caused a stir similar debate about the inadequacy of existing compliance and transparency rules. The foundation is de facto controlled by Gazprom and promises both lucrative posts and financial resources to represent the interests of the Russian state-owned company (and the Kremlin in general).

Another channel for illegal foreign influence is in the form of top politicians who easily move from high-level government posts to senior positions in authoritarian regime corporations. The figurehead for this influence is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who sits on the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft and uses his reputation as a highly respected politician to promote controversial Russian state-sponsored projects.

Some former German politicians also run consulting firms that earn large sums of money to introduce German companies to political actors in authoritarian countries. These cases include social democrats and former defense ministers Rudolf Scharpingpromoting German-Chinese business and advising the former GDR Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière. The latter is an outspoken opponent of Sanctions on Russia. Functionaries of Petersburg Dialogue or the German-Russian forum are particularly vocal advocates of Russian interests.

Similarly, the parliamentary exchange group Germany-South Caucasus seems to have been used by Azerbaijan to maintain certain members of the Bundestag through travel, gifts and other perks. And after a scandal over Azerbaijani payments to members of the Bundestag, further journalistic investigations revealed that interns with ties to the regime in Baku had been placed with representatives of the CDU, SPD and opposition parties in parliament for many years in order to propagate regime interests. The Azerbaijani regime has also financed a professorship at the renowned Humboldt University in Berlin, the holder of which disseminates the regime’s very own perspective on the political affairs of the South Caucasus.

After all, foreign politicians have been able to exert significant influence through the trade in favors in the EU institutions. Hungary’s prime minister has a long time defended the interests of German automobile manufacturers in the European Council in order to strengthen its ties to the CDU and its usual coalition partner, the Christian-Social Union. criticism say that these links will be maintained in exchange for the tolerance towards increasing repression and democratic relapse in Hungary by the European People’s Party (EPP) and in particular its group in the European Parliament. While Fidesz was suspended from the EPP in 2019 before leaving for good in March 2021, failure to act earlier has facilitated the process of democratic erosion in Hungary.

Had the EU tried to put Article 7 procedures (when a member state violates core principles such as democracy and human rights) against Hungary before 2015, Budapest would not have been able to count on the support of the Polish government for law and justice after returning to power . Such a move may also have deterred Law and Justice from emulating Orban.

Now the EU has a member state no longer is considered a democracy that not only tries to water down the EU’s human rights policy, but also serves as a hub for Russian and Chinese Influence in Europe. Similarly, the EPP now awards politicians within the EU such as Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, but also EPP politicians from outside the EU such as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, each of whom is responsible for presiding over democratic relapses in their own countries.

These various ways of influencing not only weaken the EU’s commitment to defending democracy abroad, they can also damage Germany. Ultimately, the consequences of the latest CDU corruption scandals are that they undermine trust in democracy at home.

While countries like North Macedonia and Azerbaijan have limited opportunities to influence German democracy, the same channels of influence can be used by more important actors like China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. They all try to influence Germany’s foreign policy positions and decisions on purely internal German affairs. China’s lobbying for Huawei to participate in the introduction of 5G in Germany is a case in point. While Huawei has mainly relied on German companies as proxies for lobbying the Berlin government, behind these efforts is a well-funded, EU-wide one campaign For example, at public events, reports funded by Huawei and an aggressive media advance on matters that ultimately affect the security interests of Germany and the EU.

There should be an urgent need to close these avenues of corrupt foreign influence; German politicians should tackle this issue of “strategic corruption†quickly. Mandatory transparency about activities on behalf of foreign governments should be the first step. This means not only the introduction of a lobby register – which was recently decided in the German Bundestag – but also the introduction of full transparency requirements for the various types of activities that parliamentarians carry out on behalf of authoritarian governments. A systematic inventory of the various lobbying channels and the associated risks is required here. Against this background, the Bundestag should commission an independent, comprehensive study on the various routes of unauthorized foreign influence, on the basis of which it could develop proposed solutions. If it does not take action soon, trust in democracy in Germany and beyond will suffer.