Non-Governmental Organisations have bought advertising space targeting the so-called far-right—paid for with European Union monies.
These political adverts were designed to persuade the European Parliament (EP) to isolate its third largest grouping—as if needed any more persuading—an investigation in Brussels Signal revealed. The ads mostly appeared in Politico, at the end of a chain of opaque and complex financial arrangements.
Recent spending in Brussels financed ads that asked centrist and left-wing politicians to fight ‘hard-right’ political groups—which they already do, for instance by practising a cordon sanitaire in the EP and applying ‘rule-of-law’ legal actions exclusively against sovereigntist governments.
Organising the adverts, which mainly appeared in June 2024, seems like mostly the work of an NGO named Full Beam Media CLG. The NGO is listed by Politico as being the main inspiration behind an advertisement in the form of an open letter asking freshman MEPs not to cooperate with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Sweden Democrats (SD), and the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Other Full Beam Media-backed adverts depicted caricatures of EU leaders being manipulated by European populists, or by Vladimir Putin of Russia.
For an organisation seeking to shape the agenda, Full Beam Media seems to be exceptionally shy. A European Conservative exact phrase search in Google News produced some unrelated coverage of luxury yachts. Its environmentalist-leaning website describes it as an “independent campaigning organisation relying on charitable funding,” where readers are invited to come back later for more details beyond its vague environmental commitments.
The organisation has a paper existence in Ireland, where its registration details point to a business service that specialises in registering new businesses. One company director, Ivan Cheung, serves as the “Network Director Digital Strategy” for the Brussels-based green organisation the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC)—well-known for assisting Greta Thunberg’s communications team and part of the larger Meliore Foundation.
Other signatories of the “open letter” advert are definite recipients of public funding, from nation states and global players. The EU transparency register—published by a Commission rather selective about transparency—does in fact show that NGO The Good Lobby, one of the signatories, received over €67,000 in public funds. Likewise, Friends of the Earth Europe got 30% of its annual income in 2022—around at least €1 million—from the EU (supplemented by an additional 15% from other governments or institutions). Their fellow signatory Defend Democracy is listed as being in receipt of significant NATO and U.S. monies.
Full Beam Media and its allies are not alone in such covert operations. European Movement International (EMI) placed Google Ads in late June attacking Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With an annual budget of more than €1.2 million, EMI raked in the vast majority of this from EU grants in 2023—with 2024 unlikely to be any different.
Dutch then-MEP Rob Roos earlier this year in a speech criticised the way the EU and governments circumvent democracy by letting left-wing “lobby clubs” financed with public money influence the debate:
The European Union gives hundreds of millions of euros of taxpayers’ money to organisations in the field of immigration, climate or gender. Almost always left-wing hobbies. So the citizen pays for clubs that promote policies that are diametrically opposed to what the citizen wants, and which are often not at all transparent.
Governments simulate ‘democratic participation’ by sitting at the table with so-called NGOs that are paid by those same governments! But those clubs have no democratic mandate whatsoever. They have no business being at that table. A real ‘civil society’ comes from people and therefore does not need any government support at all.
With deceptively funded political advertising happening on the EU’s watch—and often with EU money—one can’t help but question the ‘transparency’ the Union claims to support and the ‘disinformation’ it rails against.
To the critically minded, non-governmental organisations can seem like a contradiction in terms. They often rely on governments to fund them, and to bail out their representatives who get into difficulty inside other nation states. The first part of this process is firmly entrenched in Brussels.
