By Graham Bowley
International Herald Tribune
Thursday, November 18, 2004
BRUSSELS One morning last week, Karl-Heinz Florenz, chairman of the European Parliament's powerful environment committee, sat in his 15th- floor office as the phone rang incessantly and his computer chimed the arrival of a string of e-mails.
"I would say 80 percent are from lobbyists," said Florenz's assistant, who waved dismissively at the phone until it stopped.
Florenz, 57, a tall, brawny, cigar-chomping German with arched black eyebrows, agreed: "They phone me, they pick me up downstairs, they write me a hundred letters a day," he complained. "It is not possible to get from here to the entrance and not see any lobbyists."
As the influence of European Union institutions has multiplied, so a nascent, Brussels-based community of professional lobbyists - lawyers, public relations professionals and public affairs consultants - has grown.
For the past six weeks, the European Parliament's attention has been focused on approving a new executive commission for the Union; on Thursday, the Parliament votes in Strasbourg on the new team of 24 commissioners.
But the deputies will shortly return to the day-to-day business of scrutinizing the minutiae of EU legislation. This is where the Parliament's enduring influence lies, a fact appreciated by the mass of lobbyists huddling ever closer to the institutional heart of Brussels.
The lobbyists go to great lengths to get close to the lawmakers. Gilded invitations to swanky Brussels dinners decorate Florenz's office. In the Parliament's long corridors, companies set up television screens and information displays to raise their profiles in deputies' thinking.
A number of high-profile rulings against companies, such as the one against Microsoft earlier this year, has underlined Brussels' power as gatekeeper to the EU's vast market of 450 million consumers.
"General Electric, Microsoft and a lot of other American companies have woken up to the fact that Brussels matters, not just on antitrust but on a whole range of regulatory areas from consumer protection to security," said Brandon Mitchener of Apco, a communications consultancy that employs 40 in its Brussels office and whose clients include Microsoft, Nike, and Procter & Gamble.
The rising clamor of debate between international companies, trade associations and pressure groups on the one hand, and lawmakers and civil servants on the other, is new to Brussels. It is a direct measure of the growing importance of the EU and its institutions in Europe's changing political landscape.
Until the 1990s, two bodies decided most EU rules: the European Commission, the EU's civil service, and the European Council, which represents national governments.
But in the 1990s, the European Parliament was included in so-called co-decision making, which gave it joint oversight with the council in approving much legislation.
Now, while European capitals still control big-picture areas of national life such as taxation or education, they have accepted the need for rules that transcend borders on issues like the environment or food safety, and, in the spirit of the EU, have passed swaths of lawmaking responsibility on to Brussels.
"There is an awful lot of attention being paid to Brussels by companies that care about public policy, now more than ever," said John Kelly, who moved from the United States to run Microsoft's Brussels office in January.
More than half of the laws enacted by European national parliaments, according to some estimates, now originate in Brussels. In areas such as the environment - areas that have a huge impact on businesses - the proportion can be 70 percent or higher, according to Enrique Tufet Opi, a director at Weber Shandwick, a leading communications consultancy with 60 people in its Brussels office.
"All the decisions are made here," he said. "Telecoms, health care, and if you think of any other industry, then regulation that is going to impact your business because of Europe's internal market regulation is going to come out of here."
This growth in power is attracting lobbyists in increasing numbers, though the size of the lobby population is hard to measure exactly. The European Parliament's Web site lists 5,039 accredited lobbyists working for a host of familiar names from Amazon to McDonald's to Visa.
But according to Corporate Europe Observatory, a lobbying watchdog, more than 15,000 lobbyists stalk Brussels' corridors and meeting rooms, and some analysts, such as David Earnshaw of Burson- Marsteller, another big consultancy, estimate the figure at more than 50,000, using a very broad definition that includes third-country missions such as the U.S. mission to the EU.
Florenz says that there are about 20,000 lobbyists - equal, he says, to the total number of civil servants in the Commission and Parliament.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Florenz was lobbied this year by the Vatican, which wanted a mention of Christianity in the EU's new constitutional treaty. Usually, however, he is the focus of attention of industrialists, who worry about his plans to make them pay to recycle their cars or computers, or to register the chemicals in their products.
Lobbyists tend to focus initially on the Commission, where the first drafts of EU laws are written. They switch their energies to the Parliament and Council after the legal texts are passed on there for scrutiny and amendment.
The broadening of decision-making power to include the Parliament's 732 deputies has transformed the way lobbyists have to work.
"You need a message that works in terms of different nationalities and different languages," said Tufet Opi of Weber Shandwick. He said the industry was entering a more sophisticated stage, with lobbyists having to extend their message beyond lawmakers to pressure groups and the Brussels-based media.
Another trend is the opening of offices by regional governments - the West Midlands in England or Lower Saxony in Germany - whose views may be distinct from those of their national governments, for example in seeking EU regional aid grants.
"Regional governments in Hungary ask me, 'How can we escape the control of Budapest?"' said Rinus van Schendelen, a professor of political science at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the author of "Machiavelli in Brussels: The Art of Lobbying the EU."
"They want to become influential themselves at the EU level," he said.
Trade unions, too, have a voice, including national bodies such as Britain's GMB or big pan-Continental groupings such as the European Trade Union Confederation, which represents its 60 million members at the Brussels level.
The rise in lobbyists is such that it has sparked a debate about whether corporations are gaining too much influence. "They can be very helpful," said one Brussels civil servant. "Sometimes you are working on a shoestring budget. You are talking to them on the phone and say, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have a study on this or that?' And bang, there's the report."
In an attempt to offset the power of corporations, nongovernmental organizations and pressure groups have also begun to lobby in Brussels. Last month, 50 NGOs wrote an open letter warning of "the excessive influence of corporate lobby groups over EU policy making," which they said was approaching levels seen in the United States.
The lobbyists counter that they provide expert knowledge that policy makers would not otherwise have, as well as an important point of view.
One of Brussels' most active lobbyists, Charles Laroche of Unilever, the multinational consumer goods group, says he represents the needs of consumers. "Citizens are also consumers," Laroche said. "We go into the Parliament and read through draft legislation with them and ask, 'What is in this for the consumer?"'
Van Schendelen said he believes that lobbying benefits democracy as long as no single lobbying group has a monopoly.
Meanwhile, in his 15th-floor office, Florenz may complain of lobbyists' enthusiasm, but he also accepts that they have a crucial role to play.
"They have views and sometimes they are right," he said, as the phone rang again. "Lobbying is now part of my life."