‘We’re in danger,’ NGOs say as German conservatives join far-right crackdown on civil society

BRUSSELS — German conservatives and the Hungarian far right may have little in common, but they do agree on one thing: Non-governmental organizations rank high on their list of enemies.

In a significant political maneuver, incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic alliance (CDU) last week submitted an inquiry targeting NGOs, which involved 551 parliamentary questions for organizations such as Greenpeace and Grandmas Against the Far Right. Critics saw the inquest as an assault on civil society after NGOs joined protests against the CDU’s January alignment on migration with the far-right Alternative for Germany.   

More broadly across Europe, authoritarian leaders have increasingly sought to limit the influence of NGOs, particularly those that support environmental concerns, human rights or equality in opposition to their politics. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made suppressing civil society one of his government’s consistent priorities, while Slovakia’s leftist-populist Prime Minister Robert Fico has also sought to bring NGOs to heel. 

So far, the official line taken by center-right parties has been to keep their distance from the far right in line with Europe’s cordon sanitaire. 

But NGOs and left-leaning groups within the European Parliament, such as The Left and the Greens, fear that Germany’s domestic battle could play out at the level of EU institutions by creating a pathway for conservatives and the far right to connect. 

The center-right European People’s Party has already kickstarted a campaign — backed by the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and the far-right Patriots for Europe — to examine whether European Commission funding for green NGOs was used to lobby in Brussels. 

As budget talks loom in the Parliament, the EPP, where the CDU is a key member, could use this common stance on funding to build a new majority with far-right parties, some left-leaning groups have worried. 

“We have seen dangerous tendencies with regard to civil society support in other countries, and I cannot believe the CDU wants to find themselves in this camp,” said René Repasi, head of the German socialist delegation in the European Parliament.  

“Singling out NGOs, as the European People’s Party and the CDU are doing, is unjustified and deeply worrying,” said Ciarán Cuffe, co-chair of the European Green Party. “We don’t want the EPP to become some kind of Orwellian thought police, telling civil society what to think.” 

Despite the CDU’s domestic probe into civil society in Germany, the EPP has not embraced a committee of inquiry in the Parliament into NGO funding, as proposed by the ECR. But the CDU’s strategy could still embolden EPP members to scrutinize EU-funded NGOs more aggressively within the Parliament’s budget committee.

The EPP group “certainly plans to continue to work on these questions using the tools of the budget committee (CONT) and the parliamentary discharge procedure [an audit capacity given to MEPs],” an EPP group spokesperson said.

NGOs said the CDU’s recent foray into supervision could further erode the role of civil society in European governance at a time when it already faces severe funding cuts from U.S. foreign aid.

“Civil society, globally, is facing an existential crisis due to sweeping funding cuts by the Trump administration and others,” said Nick Aiossa, head of Transparency International in Europe. 

“The CDU, in both Brussels and Germany, should be aware they risk exacerbating these devastating trends in the EU.”

“What is clear is that there is a certain anti-NGO hysteria,” said Esther Martinez, director of Reclaim, an NGO addressing the rule of law, civil rights and media freedoms in the EU. “And it is not good news for democracy.” She noted that the EPP had ended up distancing itself from Orbàn’s crackdown on NGOs. 

A few days prior to the CDU inquiry, Hungary’s government intensified its push to gain full access to EU-funded NGO contracts ahead of the monthly General Affairs Council.

This came on the heels of accusations from MCC Brussels, a government-aligned think tank in the EU capital, which claimed the European Commission had weaponized NGO funding as part of a “propaganda machine.” 

More recently, the Commission brought Hungary before the EU’s top court over its “sovereignty” law, which creates an office tasked with examining the foreign funding of NGOs and other bodies and allegedly paves the way to target civil society and the political opposition.