The transparency of lobbying in the European Union is still an uneven area that is complicated to date in 2025. Despite the fact that the EU Transparency Register is a centralizing source of influence tracking on the European level, member states enforce vastly different national legislation, definitions, and enforcement regulations.
By mid-2025, the Transparency Register has 14,815 organizations, reflecting a total lobbying spending of between 1.6 and 2.2 billion a year. These numbers, although comprehensive, provide an incomplete picture because of the country-specific differences in registration procedures and legal requirements of disclosing information to the public.
Registration on the Transparency Register has become a de facto condition since 2021, in order to have access to senior EU officials and members of the Parliament. Nonetheless, implementation is more of an administrative than a punitive action that can lead to limited access instead of a punishment. In this regard, the national legislation is in the spotlight of clarification of how transparency in lobbying is perceived, tracked and implemented in EU member states.
Mandatory and Comprehensive Lobby Registers in Key States
Currently Germany has a federal lobby register, implemented in 2022, which has since been extended and now both corporate and consultant lobbyists must be registered. By 2025 there are 6,166 registered organizations and 28,557 individuals under this framework. The accountability of Germany through the legislation footprint initiative has also improved accountability by monitoring the inputs of lobbying in the process of drafting legislations. Although it has made strides, certain transparency advocates note that such data have been ineffective with respect to usability as well as as far as capturing informal interactions between lobbying and lobbyist activities.
Ireland’s High-Compliance Model
Ireland has one of the strictest lobbying disclosure laws in the EU. The system requires quarterly reporting by any individual or organization lobbying any of the appointed public officials whether they are consultants or directly working in the capacity of an organization. The enforcement authority proactively imposes financial fines and in other instances prosecutes non-compliance. Already in 2022, 468 fixed-penalty notices have been issued. It is an approach that emphasizes transparency as a fundamental democratic value in Ireland because of its legal and cultural beliefs.
France’s Expansive Yet Uneven Implementation
France has a broad register which is supervised by the High Authority on Transparency in Public Life (HATVP). The framework is applicable to the lobbyists who exceed specific thresholds in the amount of lobbying they do and whose activity is subject to detailed reporting on the annual lobbying spending and the annual goals. However, inconsistencies in enforcement especially when it comes to enforcing the rules to senior leaders and certain political players have restricted the breadth of the framework. Nevertheless, France is still among the most informative nations on the issue of lobbying disclosures, where tens of thousands of reports have been released each year.
Minimal Regulation and Limited Scope in Other States
Poland has one of the fewest national lobbying registers in the EU with only 19 registered individual lobbyists. The register only applies to consultant lobbyists, and does not require a mandatory reporting of in-house or sectoral advocates. What is perceived to be happening in terms of lobbying is not documented in the legal framework and the transparency organizations have expressed concern regarding this high underreporting. The same tendencies can be observed in Bulgaria, Malta, where lobbying is either not regulated at all or there is a lack of legislation to control it.
Voluntary and Emerging Registers
In 2022, Spain proposed a law to establish a public and mandatory lobby register. By 2025, the process of implementation is still ongoing with partial integration being experienced in some ministries. Italy, although it has been proposed and consulted several times, still has no national law that governs lobbying activities. The Netherlands has a voluntary register, which, however, deals with only a small group of actors, mostly with Parliament.
Finland’s Recent Developments
In 2024 Finland was the first country to release its own national Transparency Register. Entities must report lobbying activities undertaken to Parliament and ministries, which makes it one of the most recent EU states to implement a formal lobbying reporting requirement. The register contains contact details, lobbying aims and links to particular laws and regulations providing an expanding example of full regulation in Northern Europe.
Quality of Disclosure and Access to Lobbying Information
In member states that have strong structures, like France, Germany, and Ireland, the identity of lobbyists, issues, and contact methods are normally listed in the public databases. The database of France, as an example, comprises more than 66,900 reports, most of which describe not only the lobbying meetings, but also other forms of communication, such as written submissions or participation in events.
To supplement its transparency, Ireland also allows the population to verify their lobbyist disclosures with the records of the official meetings and minimize the possibility of false or incomplete reporting. The same can be said about Lithuania, which implements a two-check system that requires the disclosure to be made both by the lobbyists and the officials.
EU Institutional Transparency Measures
The European Commission and European Parliament at the EU level have dramatically increased the release of lobby meetings. The Commission has published over 21,191 high-level meetings since 2019 and the Parliament published more than 56,800 entries of lobbyists. The analysis conducted by Transparency International in 2025 in spite of this development found that 75 percent of Commission meetings were attended by corporate representatives and it was observed that unequal access and influence was a factor.
The level of lobbying by multinationals and sectoral organisation in Brussels remains predominant and restricts access to the civil society even with open registration processes.
Rule of Law Monitoring and Ongoing Recommendations
Between 2019 and 2025, the European Commission EU RuleofLawReports have continued to recommend the need to strengthen lobbying laws in at least 12 European countries. Recommendations to implement more transparent legal systems, more surveillance and enhance access to data have been given to Austria, Belgium, Croatia and Czech Republic. A number of these countries are already in the process of consultations or drafting of laws, and the outcomes are likely to be seen by 2026.
At the same time, the civil society organizations do not stop their surveillance and promotion of reforms and it is the connection between transparency and democratic trust. Specifically, the increase in the number of foreign-funded influence operations and strategic disinformation campaigns has increased the urgency of combating opaque lobbying practices.
The fact that the EU member states have diversity in their regulations on lobbying disclosure indicates that the entire European political governance is more complex. Some countries such as Germany, Ireland, or France have developed organised enforceable frameworks that have high compliance standards but there are others that still resort to voluntary systems or those that have not regulated the acts of lobbying in any significant way. These gaps could finally be filled by the push towards a harmonized, EU-wide framework, but only then, subject to political will, administrative coordination and changes in culture towards institutional openness. With the issues of influence and legitimacy becoming central in the politics of Europe, the way in which the visibility of lobbying is going to change might evolves the future of trust and the credibility of policy-making in the whole of Europe.
