Anti-corruption gaps are leaving democracy in Europe exposed

Across much of Europe, weak integrity standards are leaving democracies exposed. Where rules are absent or poorly enforced, decision-making becomes vulnerable to influence that the public cannot scrutinise. This is allowing vested interests to shape policy on issues as important as healthcare, technology and countering corruption in politics. Where enforcement is under-resourced or politically constrained, corrupt people go unpunished and undetected.

Worrying examples include Slovakian lawmakers making it easier for officials to get away with corruption, a political party in Germany receiving over €2 million from a concealed source, and the telecommunications company Huawei allegedly bribing members of the European Parliament in an effort to secure favourable treatment. The fallout from such recent scandals and potential abuses has eroded the public’s trust in the system, while once again underlining the need to tighten up loopholes in public integrity.

Anti-corruption is an essential line of defence for democracy. Without it, elections get skewed as wealthy and hidden donors give parties unfair advantages and corrupt politicians weaken electoral authorities so that they cannot ensure a level playing field. The justice systems that democracies rely on cannot consistently uphold the law when money and connections undermine their rules and procedures. At a time when foreign authoritarian regimes are intensively working to weaken and divide Europe, unregulated lobbying and political finance give them many opportunities to take hold of decision-makers and cause damage. What is more, corporations that put profit above the common good are using similar avenues to distort policy, and the consequences range from environmental degradation to deepening inequality and weakened public services.

Fortunately, EU member states have the opportunity to introduce stronger safeguards against corruption by transposing the EU Anti-Corruption Directive. The Directive represents an important step towards harmonising anti-corruption rules across the EU, but it ultimately missed the opportunity to advance a more ambitious reform agenda and strengthen preventive standards. Nonetheless, countries still have to go through the process of translating the Directive into their national laws. This transposition stage is a big chance for them to go beyond minimum requirements and significantly improve their laws, institutions and ways of working to better stop the abuse of power and protect their democracies.

EU member states cannot afford to wait, and the evidence makes clear why – the European Commission 2026 Rule of Law Reports and our own research have once again highlighted that too many states are not meeting key anti-corruption standards. For the seventh year in a row, the EU’s rule of law reports have highlighted these failings, and Transparency International’s year-by-year comparison of eight European countries’ reports paints an even bleaker picture. It shows long-term inaction against corruption and backsliding in some countries, with all having gaps against international best practice standards.

A recurring finding across our analysis is the gap between anti-corruption laws on paper and their implementation in practice. While most EU countries have criminalised the key corruption offences set out in the UN Convention against Corruption, shortcomings in enforcement continue to undermine their effectiveness – in many cases, oversight bodies are under-resourced, lack sufficient independence or investigative powers, and struggle to impose meaningful sanctions.

Recent developments in some countries have also weakened existing safeguards. Slovakia has recently shortened statutes of limitations so various officials can no longer be prosecuted for the acts they reportedly committed and weakened punishments for a range of corruption offences. Additionally, Italy abolished the offence of the abuse of office, and no alternative dissuasive measures or appropriate sanctions have been introduced.

Leaders’ lack of commitment is undermining many preventative anti-corruption efforts, including one that lies at the heart of democracy – a bloc-wide failure to meaningfully uphold political integrity. By failing to control money in politics, lobbying and the revolving doors between private and public sector jobs, and also failing to ensure that politicians’ assets and interests are fully declared, countries across the EU and Serbia, as an aspiring member, are creating opportunities for companies and foreign governments to influence decision-makers in their interest rather than that of the public. It is no surprise then that over half of Europeans believe that corruption is widespread in political parties. The same is the case in enlargement countries.

European leaders’ frequent failure to build the basic safeguards against political corruption takes many forms – transparency systems are underdeveloped, oversight bodies lack the powers or independence they need, and reforms are too often delayed, narrowed or abandoned before they can make a real difference.

Political finance is one of the clearest examples. Our review of eight countries’ political finance frameworks found that most do require parties, candidates, and campaigns to record and report both donations and donors’ names. Yet only Germany provides anything close real-time publication of that information, and only publication of donations above €35,000. Only the Netherlands and Bulgaria provide machine-readable registers aimed at making the data easy to search through. Our research found persistent gaps in the political finance frameworks of all countries under review, such as lack of transparency, oversight, and dissuasive sanctions. Although the EU Commission has flagged these issues in its reports, it has failed to issue any concrete recommendations.

The one exception to this is Italy. The EU Commission has repeatedly requested Italy to close loopholes that allow donations to be channelled through underregulated political foundations and associations. But progress has been minimal. Although draft legislation to tighten up donation channels has been discussed, it has not been adopted. The blockage is in many ways structural: since Italy phased out direct public funding for political parties, foundations and associations have become important sources of political money, giving major parties little incentive to subject them to stronger regulation.

Italy has also received recommendations over several years about its lack of a unified political finance transparency register. Currently, the data on donations is dispersed across multiple agencies, and a lack of uniform reporting formats further complicates the process.

A persistent shortcoming also flagged by rule of law reports on Germany, Slovakia, Serbia and Bulgaria is the lack of independence, resources and capacities of the oversight bodies for political finance. Issues include insufficient human and financial resources, politically appointed leaders or lack of effective sanctioning mechanisms.

Even when oversight bodies are strong and independent, problems with processing data on money in politics and other corruption-related issues are undermining investigations. Authorities must often manually piece together information, increasing effort and costing valuable time. These issues present significant barriers to corruption investigations – not only for public institutions, but also for journalists and civil society organisations who are frequently the ones to first expose crimes through their independent research.

Attempts to create a transparent system where everyone knows who lobbies whom show the same lack of ambition, as reflected by numerous European Commission recommendations centring on this issue, which remain unfulfilled year after year. Six of the countries we reviewed received recommendations over several years calling for reforms of their lobbying frameworks.

Serbia provides partial regulation, but its narrow definition of lobbying - which only covers a limited range of interactions between lobbyists and policy-makers - means its register does not function as a genuinely mandatory transparency mechanism. Meanwhile, Bulgaria recently adopted a new lobbying law, although civil society organisations have raised concerns that the exemptions it would allow certain actors, mainly lawyers and employers' organisations. It remains to be seen how this regulation will be applied in practice and to what extent the established register will comply with international standards. The remaining four countries – Slovakia, the Netherlands, Italy, and Hungary - lack both comprehensive lobbying regulation and a mandatory register, leaving interactions between lobbyists and public officials largely outside any formal transparency framework.

Even relatively strong frameworks like Ireland’s can miss large parts of how influence works in practice. Gaps remain around things like recording how much money is spent on lobbying, regulating gifts and hospitality, and addressing “shadow” lobbyists (who are paid advisors that shape but do not formally conduct lobbying activity). In other words, lawmakers must rigorously consult on and develop frameworks that ensure that the public can clearly see how influence is exercised in all of its forms.

Another crucial facet of an effective lobbying framework is the rules governing public officials who are lobbied. On the movement of officials between public and private-sector jobs, a total of 10 recommendations were issued specifically calling for strengthening “revolving door” prevention mechanisms across Ireland, Hungary, the Netherlands and Germany.

According to a 2019 GRECO report, Hungary rolled out codes of ethics across the public sector, but implementation was uneven and concentrated reform at the lower administrative and judicial tiers while sparing those at the top. This approach was part of the system the previous government had created, which limited public scrutiny while allowing the ruling elite’s personal enrichment, concentration of power and impunity for corruption.

Germany and the Netherlands, however, show that progress is possible: both had revised revolving-door rules for former high-ranking public officials by 2025, leading to the only instances of European Commission recommendations to countries in our study being phased out following a degree of progress. But significant gaps remain, and the Commission should continue to monitor the implementation of their reforms while calling for more ambitious advances. Notably, the Netherlands still does not apply these stricter rules to high-level civil servants, and Germany has yet to increase cooling-off periods for senior government officials. This raises concerns about whether officials are making decisions in the public interest or leaving the door open for private-sector jobs. Addressing these weaknesses would require politicians to regulate themselves, which may explain the slow progress.

Assets and Interest declarations are another weak point across Europe, with a lack of consequences reducing pressure on politicians to make full declarations of their wealth. Of the eight countries examined, only Serbia and Slovakia have introduced centralised digital filing systems for collecting declarations. When it comes to disclosure obligations, the Netherlands, Ireland and Germany require a range of public officials to file declarations, but only those of MPs have to be made publicly available. This leads to key data being hidden from public scrutiny, limiting the frameworks’ effectiveness. Italy and Bulgaria lack both a centralised digital collection system and publicly accessible asset declaration registers.

Hungary illustrates the danger of governments doing little to meaningfully expose risk and wrongdoing. Public officials have been obliged to file declarations for years, but without proper verification, public access to the data, expert analysis or sanctions, these declarations have so far done little to reveal unexplained wealth or conflicts of interest. Fortunately, that may be changing. As part of a broader pro-rule-of-law and democracy campaign, the new Hungarian government has begun reforming the assets and interest declaration systems, expanded the powers of an oversight body responsible for verification, and has already referred some suspicious cases to prosecutors. These changes address several of the weaknesses identified under the previous government, although their effectiveness will ultimately depend on how consistently the new powers are enforced.

Serbia has established formal reporting obligations for public officials, a centralised register, and a publicly accessible platform. However, the country still struggles with substantial shortcomings in data access for enabling third-party monitoring, and a lack of proper verification, which remains extremely limited, with the oversight agency checking well below 1% of declarations annually. Regional assessments similarly call for stronger, risk-based verification; more comprehensive, machine-readable publication of declarations; and effective sanctions for incomplete, inaccurate or late reporting across the Western Balkans.

The European Commission's recommendations have helped keep many of these issues on the agenda, but the mechanism has yet to realise its full potential as a driver of change. A lot of these recommendations are repeated near verbatim year after year, indicating that Member States are not doing enough to address them. The recommendations could also be more specific, measurable and time-bound, allowing the Commission to issue more targeted calls to action and to highlight more precisely where Member States fall short.

Across Europe, the enforcement of corruption laws often suffers from the same lack of commitment seen in prevention. Most countries have criminalised the main corruption offences required under international standards, but that does not mean they are building strong cases, sanctioning wrongdoing or deterring future abuse. Too often, the system works better on paper than in practice. Investigators and prosecutors may lack the independence, resources or protection they need to pursue powerful actors. Political pressure can discourage difficult cases or steer attention away from those close to power. And when sanctions are too weak, too rare or too slow, corruption becomes a risk worth taking rather than a serious threat to a political career or business model.

Slovakia offers a clear example of a government systematically undermining anti-corruption laws and tools. The government has dismantled key anti-corruption bodies, hollowed out investigative capacity, reduced criminal penalties and shortened limitation periods, making it impossible to prosecute many corruption cases. To make things worse, the Prosecutor General has repeatedly misused their power to annul final police and prosecutorial decisions. This has led to the closure of cases involving high-profile defendants, despite repeated calls from the European Commission for Slovakia to limit such interference. These actions are not mere drift or neglect; they are legislative and institutional choices that have weakened Slovakia’s capacity to investigate and prosecute high-level corruption.

But many of the problems in Slovakia’s anti-corruption mechanisms are also present in a lot of other European countries, even if they are not being driven by governments’ anti-democratic campaigns. Institutions’ ineffective monitoring, investigating and sanctioning of corruption emerges as a recurring gap across the countries we reviewed, with little to no reform progress over the last seven years. Recommendations have repeatedly been issued to Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ireland to strengthen their oversight institutions, with limited documented progress.

Looking beyond the recommendations, the situation is even more dire with very little progress to be seen in any of the eight countries. Where oversight bodies exist with a wide enough scope to cover the key types of political corruption – such as in Ireland, Serbia, and Bulgaria – they are under-resourced and often lack investigative and/or sanctioning powers to effectively detect breaches and dissuade wrongdoing. In Germany, the Bundestag Administration is the main body overseeing the lobby register, conflict of interest issues and political finance, therefore lacks institutional independence and is likewise under-resourced. These weaknesses have largely gone unaddressed in recent years, despite repeated calls for reform and scandals that have highlighted the consequences of inadequate oversight. One such example is the preferential arms deals benefiting the father of a Serbian minister, which underscored persistent concerns about the effectiveness of existing safeguards.

The European Commission has made recommendations to Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary to step up their prosecution of high-level corruption cases, and some of the most worrying anti-corruption red flags in Europe relate to weak or reportedly abusive prosecution.

Part of Bulgaria‘s severe democratic backsliding in recent years are concerns that the justice system is experiencing low accountability and political interference, with accusations of impunity for those in power and political repression of their opponents.. The Prosecutor General sits at the top of a highly centralised prosecution service and has broad influence over which cases move forward, while effective checks on their actions remain weak. This could help explain why serious allegations against powerful figures often do not result in charges or convictions, allowing high-level corruption to go unpunished. The same concentration of power makes it possible for the prosecution service to pursue political opponents. The July 2025 arrest of opposition-linked Varna mayor Blagomir Kotsev, under circumstances denounced by critics as politically motivated, was widely seen as one of various signs that enforcement bodies are being used to target opponents rather than act impartially.

In Bulgaria, prosecutors may face reprisals for pursuing high-level corruption cases. In Italy, two Milan prosecutors were themselves prosecuted and given eight-month prison sentences in the first and second instances over their handling of documents in the major Eni-Shell Nigeria corruption case. Although the prosecutors were ultimately acquitted by Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation, the case illustrates the importance of ensuring that prosecutors can pursue sensitive corruption investigations without undue pressure or intimidation.

Serbia’s recent judiciary reforms that weakened the Prosecution Office against Organised Crime are another example of rule of law backsliding in a country well known for reports of political pressure and interference in corruption investigations and cases. Weak enforcement is also happening in countries that seem to have “cleaner public sectors”. The Netherlands still lacks a clear offence of trading in influence – when someone uses their connections with officials to seek an improper benefit. The gap makes it harder to deal with cases where access, relationships or insider status are used to corruptly shape public decisions.

Germany has some strengths when it comes to holding corporations accountable. Companies can be fined for corruption-related wrongdoing, but only with fixed-sum administrative fines instead of sanctions proportional to the company’s revenue.

While some welcome changes have been happening in Europe, both in legislation and enforcement, they remain too rare and mostly fall short of international best practice. The EU Anti-Corruption Directive gives governments a chance to change that. Member States must transpose the Directive by June 2028 and adopt national anti-corruption strategies by June 2029. They should not use this process to do the minimum – national implementation is the moment to ambitiously address legislative gaps, capacity challenges and enforcement weaknesses to start driving corruption levels down.

European countries should:

• Ensure full, timely transparency of machine-readable political finance information, including identification of all those who donate to political parties and candidates. Also, prohibit the use of anonymous, foreign and illicit funds in politics, in line with international standards, with enforcement carried out by an independent oversight body.

• Strengthen integrity in public decision-making by updating conflict of interest and lobbying regulations, in line with regional and international standards. This should, at a minimum, guarantee that all asset and interest declarations of top public officials, as well as all lobbying meetings and gift donations, are published in a timely manner and in line with open data standards. They should also be thoroughly verified by independent institutions.

• Build investigative capacity, combining investment in specialised training, forensic accounting, financial investigations and data analytics with modern investigative technologies and improved IT and information-sharing systems to enable secure cross-border collaboration.

• Address gaps in enforcement frameworks, such as creating coherent national frameworks for non-trial resolutions based on transparency, proportionality and meaningful victim engagement.

• Invest in enforcement capacity and incentivise investigators and prosecutors to pursue complex, high-value, and significant corruption cases, ensuring they are free from political interference. This will help them to drive systemic change.

• Give oversight bodies the independence, powers, resources and data access they need to enforce the rules, as well as the authority to cooperate between relevant institutions domestically and across the EU, including through data sharing, joint investigations and joint activities.

The European Commission must also raise its own level of ambition with consistent enforcement action, making full use of the tools at its disposal, including infringement procedures, where Member States fail to address recommendations or backslide. It should:

• Strengthen rule of law recommendations to be formulated as SMART objectives so that they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

• Ensure that Member States’ persistent failure to address issues identified in the Rule of Law Report carries meaningful consequences such as progressive freezing of EU funds.

• Guarantee that the forthcoming EU Anti-Corruption Strategy sets out a coherent, accountable, and forward-looking EU-wide vision, ensuring robust cross-border cooperation and data-driven approaches that place transparency and proactive detection at the centre - rather than serving solely as a tool to monitor implementation of the Anti-Corruption Directive.

• Make sure that EU candidate countries’ progress in accession processes is dependent on strong anti-corruption frameworks and their effective implementation, especially where high-level corruption is concerned.
  

Europe must urgently close the gaps that allow corruption to take hold. Weak systems make it easier for businesses, criminal networks and authoritarian actors to capture politics and damage societies. This is more than just an anti-corruption matter – it is a test of Europe’s democratic resilience.