19 May 2026
The transatlantic alliance of the right and far right to undermine European democracy and civil society
19 May 2026
Viktor Orbán’s stinging defeat in the April Hungarian elections came as a relief to many, who hoped that illiberal influence in Europe, and with it the most reactionary tendencies of the anti-democratic far right, had finally run their course. But the roots of the disease have taken hold deep within European institutions and are far from being eradicated. Worse still, they have found one of their most unsuspected and solid footholds in the drift toward the far right of the conservative wing of the European People’s Party (EPP).
While von der Leyen congratulated the new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar on his electoral success, calling it a victory for fundamental freedoms and for a European Union that is stronger and more united, the reactionary, illiberal, and neo-fascist threat continues to operate, away from the spotlight, extending its web across Brussels, in particular through an ad hoc parliamentary “Scrutiny Working Group” openly destined to question the role of civil society and to attack NGOs’ funding in order to implement the far right’s dystopian vision of an illiberal Europe. This endeavor is coupled to a parallel offensive by MAGA movements, which, in February 2025 announced plans to fund a powerful network of think tanks aiming to bring about a reactionary shift across the Old Continent (1). Their objective: to trigger “European chaos.”
>> Read our report Operation: “European Chaos” <<<
Our exclusive investigation tells the story of a deliberate, coordinated, and historically unprecedented offensive waged by the European right and far-right forces, against civil society, NGOs, and the very foundations of European democracies.
What begins as a story of parliamentary retaliation led by the European conservative right (the European People’s Party) ends as an alarm bell about the structural transformation of European politics under the combined pressure of reactionary forces on both sides of the Atlantic.
The EPP’s war on NGOs
The roots of this offensive lie in one of the most symbolically charged legislative battles of the previous European Parliament: the adoption of the Nature Restoration Law (NRL) in 2023. Environmental civil society organizations played a decisive role in rescuing this text from the brink of erasure, overcoming a harsh campaign led by EPP Group President Manfred Weber to suppress the bill.
In the wake of that defeat, the EPP embarked on a systematic campaign to delegitimize NGOs, reframing civil society advocacy as a reputational threat to European institutions and branding any EU financial support granted to NGOs as a misuse of public funds. Following the 2024 European elections, which brought a historic surge of far-right forces into the Parliament, this campaign accelerated dramatically.
The anti-NGO blitz
As of November 2025, a coordinated Blitz offensive against NGOs was made public: the parliamentary instrument through which the EPP chose to institutionalize its attack was the Scrutiny Working Group (SWG) on NGOs’ funding, created within the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) to bring to the heart of European institutions a reactionary, MAGA-related rhetoric against civil society. This decision marked a historic rupture: far from the spotlight and attention of the media, even prefiguring the ominous alliance of the European right and far right on legislative files such as the Omnibus I legislation, the EPP broke the cordon sanitaire that had kept far-right groups away from the legislative process for decades by forging an alliance with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), Patriots for Europe (PfE), and Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) to enact the Scrutiny Working Group. Alarmingly, the conservative right EPP group took this step on a symbolic matter attacking the core of European democratic counter-powers: NGOs.
When Social-Democrat, Liberal, and Green MEPs walked out of the Scrutiny Working Group’s inaugural session on 26 November 2025, denouncing a “witch hunt” against civil society, they were calling out what the Scrutiny Working Group’s own co-rapporteur, Dutch EPP MEP Dirk Gotink, formerly Manfred Weber’s personal spokesperson, would later confirm with disarming candor: “The problem that we’re pursuing here is not to establish whether things are illegal, it is to establish whether politically it is undesirable.” (2)
BLOOM has analyzed, with unprecedented detail and depth, the dynamics and key players operating at the heart of this European Parliamentary illiberal instrument. The Scrutiny Working Group’s composition tells its own story. Chaired (before his nomination as head of the EPP German delegation) by Niclas Herbst, one of the EPP’s most influential German MEPs and long arm of Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Europe, it brings together figures whose connections to industrial lobbies, far-right movements and reactionary networks are meticulously documented in this report.
The Scrutiny Working Group serves a clear purpose: to manufacture a climate of suspicion, destabilize civil society organizations on a financial and reputational level, and clear the field for the EPP’s and far-right deregulatory steamroller. The Scrutiny Working Group is not an isolated aberration, it is the European Parliament’s contribution to a continent-wide program of civic space restriction.
The transatlantic obscurantist network behind the offensive
To better navigate the unfamiliar geography of a Europe driven by an explicit alliance between the right wing of the EPP and the obscurantist neo-fascist far right, it is essential to equip ourselves with new and up-to-date charts and tools. This is why BLOOM has used this report to map the dense ecosystem of think tanks, political foundations, and transatlantic networks that provide the far right and the EPP with its ideological fuel, its organizational infrastructure and its political legitimacy. What this investigation reveals is not a loose collection of like-minded actors, but a structured and mutually reinforced international network that operates with increasing coordination and ambition.
A mapping of proven links between various institutional actors on the European and American right and far right. The list of links identified in the mapping can be found in Annex II of our report.
Our Operation: “European Chaos” investigation draws an unprecedented, holistic map of the network of far-right, conservative and obscurantist organizations collaborating on both sides of the Atlantic to undermine the very heart of the European democratic project. BLOOM’s cartography distinguishes itself from previous works through its transversal, cross-thematic approach and its detailed, up-to-date mapping of the links connecting the nodes of this network. While an illiberal EU-US web is under construction, we trace the bridges connecting the International Democrat Union (IDU), the Heritage Foundation, the America First Policy Institute, the Heartland Institute and other American organizations with, on the European side, Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and its Brussels arm MCC Brussels, the Danube Institute, Poland’s Ordo Iuris, Italy’s Centro Studi Machiavelli and Nazione Futura, the Atlas Network’s European offshoots EPICENTER and ECIPE, and, most importantly, the right-wing and far-right political groups of the European Parliament. This cartography provides a precious tool for the media, political analysists and citizens to understand and disentangle the cryptic connections of the illiberal alliance working to undermine the very fabric of European democracy.
Beyond the traditional transatlantic ties and lobbying dynamics that have been at play for decades, BLOOM reveals the emergence of a “circular legitimacy dynamic” that is rapidly reshaping political discourse in Brussels, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Washington: American organizations lend credibility and network access to European counterparts; those European bodies provide their American partners with the appearance of a broader international movement; and governments on both sides of the Atlantic then treat these networks as legitimate interlocutors, further amplifying their influence. The flow of legitimacy and influence is bidirectional and deliberate.
An open society under threat
BLOOM is sounding the alarm: the European People’s Party, the EU’s largest political group and a founding pillar of the European project for over half a century, has crossed a dangerous threshold. By allying with neo-fascist parties to silence environmental movements, by welcoming the rhetoric of the MAGA movement into European institutions, and by turning the machinery of parliamentary oversight against the very civil society that defends democratic accountability, the EPP is not merely moving further right, it is actively dismantling the architecture of the open society it once claimed to be at the core of the European values. The EPP is positioning itself as the unsuspected winged arm and enforcer of the transatlantic alliance of reactionary, obscurantist organizations and political parties.
We are now facing the very concrete risk that the relentless pressure of industrial lobbies crushes European democratic debate; that organizations capable of defending citizens, the climate, and the rule of law are starved of funding and stripped of legitimacy; and that European institutions slide into a closed society in which only the champions of deregulation have access to decision-makers and a voice in the process.
The cordon sanitaire has not merely been breached; it has been dismantled from within by those who ought to have protected it the most.
>> Read our report Operation: “European Chaos” <<<
NOTES
(1) The Financial Times (05/02/2026). US government to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities in Europe