21/11/2025
The European Commission has released its Civil Society Strategy – and while it lands with promising language, it still reads more like a safety leaflet than the emergency response Europe’s civic space urgently needs.
To its credit, the Strategy states the obvious but essential: civil society isn’t a subcontractor to democracy, it is democracy. And it affirms that EU funding is meant to support advocacy, watchdog work and policy oversight – a useful corrective at a time the EU Parliament is about to set up its first Working Group to scrutinise NGOs’ funding, to legitimise the narrative of NGOs as infiltrators rather than democratic actors.
Brussels is also promising a new Civil Society Platform and a set of principles – transparency, inclusivity, accountability – to govern how institutions engage with civic actors. All good. All necessary.
But here’s the catch. In recent years, the same institutions now preaching participation have sidelined NGOs in key policy reforms, prioritised industry access, and treated evidence-based input as a nuisance rather than an asset. The Strategy fails to acknowledge this reality and explain how the Commission will stop repeating those mistakes – let alone how it will respond when it does.
Meanwhile, across Europe, organisations are squeezed by legal threats, funding cuts, smear campaigns and administrative choke points. The Good Lobby’s work is trying to expose how coordinated and corrosive these pressures have become. They follow the very playbook Prof. Alberto Alemanno has warned about: delegitimise, defund, overregulate – and the democratic guardrails weaken in silence.
Just this week, The Good Lobby – together with 30 other organisations – urged progressive groups in the European Parliament to maintain their boycott of the newly created Scrutiny Working Group on NGOs, a body that risks legitimising the very attacks on civil society the Strategy claims to counter.
So yes, the Strategy is a step forward. But steps are not enough when the ground is shrinking beneath our feet. What Europe needs now is to provide:
access to decision-making, not symbolic dialogues;
protection for those holding power to account;
stable funding for public-interest work;
remedies when participation rules are ignored.
If the Commission wants to prove this Strategy is more than a brochure, it must start enforcing the standards it just set. Civil society doesn’t need praise. It needs guarantees to continue playing its role.