The “Parliament” series illustrates the weight of lobbies in Brussels

TV SERIES – This May 9 is synonymous with Europe Day… and especially the return of Parliament. The comedy on the European institutions returns this Monday with a season 2 available on france.tv. At the same time, France 5 broadcasts at 9:00 p.m. the first season of the series which had attracted more than 2 million curious people on the FranceTV Slash platform in April 2020.

On this occasion, The HuffPost proposed to Adrien Le Louarn, parliamentary assistant in Brussels, to decipher, in a video to see at the top of this article, the series that honors this crucial role of shadow workers. In this Franco-German co-production, Samy (Xavier Lacaille) plays a young parliamentary assistant to MP Michel Specklin (Philippe Duquesne) who seems just as lost in Parliament as his new assistant.

Together, they will try to defend an amendment prohibiting the finning, shark fin cutting. But they will rub shoulders with power games and pressure from lobbies that defend private interests.

The negotiations at the “Mickey Mouse Bar” of the Parliament

The series already recalls how much lobbyists and parliamentarians rub shoulders daily since the pressure groups have access to the building if they are registered on the transparency register, a very real public list which lists the different pressure groups in Brussels. They are just over 12,000 as of May 9, 2022.

If meetings never happen by chance, as is the case in the series with Samy, they do take place in the cafeteria of the Parliament, a major place in the institution which bears a name that is nevertheless highly improbable.

“There is a complete discrepancy since the main cafeteria of the European Parliament is called the ‘Mickey Mouse Bar’”, quips Adrien Le Louarn, who works for MP Manon Aubry, co-president of the Left group in the European Parliament. “Behind this childish and friendly name, this place actually allows the tobacco industry to get its ideas across since it is in these multicolored armchairs that lobbyists will discuss very important subjects with MPs.”

“Ready-to-use amendments” from lobbies

In Parliament, Guido Bonafide (Nicollo Senni), the lobbyist who defends the interests of fishermen, goes so far as to write amendments in place of the deputies, submitting them directly to Samy, the parliamentary assistant. Here again, deja vu in Brussels.

“This scene shows how determined lobbyists are to defend their interests by writing when they need to, turnkey amendments to a package of deputies”, explains Adrien Le Louarn, who however tempers by specifying that these lobbies cannot not act alone. “If these amendments end up being presented and adopted, it is thanks to the complicity of certain deputies who agree to defend them. Without this relay in the hemicycle the power of the lobbies is nil.”

This weight of lobbies on the votes in Parliament made the news again on May 3 with the controversy surrounding the ban on trawl fishing. LREM MEP Pierre Karleskind, Chairman of the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee, has done everything to preserve this decried practice, tabling an amendment aimed at banning destructive fishing techniques only in areas of strict protection… This is already the case in France. An amendment deemed “hypocritical” by the NGO Bloom, considering that it was typically “that of the Breton industrial trawler fishing lobby.”

The plague of revolving doors

To influence policy at European level, lobbies can rely on a major lever of action: revolving doors. An expression to describe former parliamentary assistants, deputies or European commissioners who end up going to the other side of the barrier, becoming a lobbyist. This is the case of Rose (Lize Kingsman) in Parliamentwho defends the interests of banks after resigning as parliamentary assistant to a pro-Brexit British MP.

For Adrien Le Louarn, this phenomenon is one of the greatest scourges of Parliament today. “These people come out of the public with an address book and experience of how the bureaucratic machine works. They will be able to put all these acquired skills at the service of private interests, as for the tobacco lobby, or multinationals.”

This is how Connie Hedegaard, former European Commissioner for Climate Action, was recruited by Volkswagen, or how José Manuel Barroso, former President of the European Commission joined the Goldman Sachs bank. The problem is such that the European Ombudsman launched an investigation into this « revolving door » in Brussels in May 2021. At present the rules are not very restrictive and the institutions rely a lot on trust in their commissioners not to go work for these pressure groups.

Talking to lobbies, a real strategy

Adrien Le Louarn admits that he does not frequent many lobbies. Already for a very simple reason: “I work for a radical left group (…) The lobbies are professionals, when they have to get their ideas across, they know that they have to go to those who are most able to defend them. When you are a fishing lobby, you will try to go to liberal groups rather than those on the left or environmentalists.

Trying to “hit up” MEPs also means risking being discredited in public. Manon Aubry publicly lists on Twitter what she calls “dangerous liaisons” with these lobbies. It had also launched in November 2021 its “Prix des lobbies”, a parody prize to denounce practices at the level of the European Parliament. A reward awarded to lobbyists who had tried to seduce the MP … in vain.

However, frequenting lobbies can turn out to be very strategic. “Talking to lobbies that defend interests opposed to ours is interesting, because it sometimes allows us to discover the opponents’ arguments and thus better prepare ourselves to counter them,” explains Adrien Le Louarn.

Behind the label of lobby do not only hide the multinationals. Many NGOs defending women’s rights or the environment are also registered in the transparency register. This is the case of Greenpeace or WWF in particular. « We make a difference between those who lobby and advocate: those who defend private interests and the common interest », concludes the parliamentary assistant, believing that we should not put all the pressure groups in the same basket.

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