Ranked: The 10 most intensely lobbied EU laws

BRUSSELS — All European Union laws are lobbied, but some are lobbied more than others.

Brussels is known as a rulemaking machine. And, in line with many other political power centers, it is home to a staggering number of people whose job it is to influence the final shape of those rules.

As of April, more than 14,000 organizations or people were listed on the EU’s Transparency Register of official lobbyists, giving them permission to lean on politicians and bureaucrats and steer the rules coming out of the EU machinery. 

But where have the Brussels bubble’s corporate executives, associations, consultancies, civil society, researchers, lawyers and others been focusing their efforts?

Lobbying can be a hard activity to pin down — and keeping track of who influences what is an ongoing challenge for EU institutions. But there’s one useful proxy: the number of amendments a bill receives as it passes through the European Parliament.

By persuading lawmakers to file amendments, lobbyists seek to tweak legal texts to their advantage. Counting the number of proposed changes to a bill is a reliable reflection of the amount of controversy a bill stirs and the interests at stake. It’s also one of the few publicly recorded indicators of what goes on behind the scenes in Brussels’ largely opaque lawmaking process.

POLITICO pulled the data on 5,000 bills stretching back 20 years on its legislation-tracking platform to count the number of amendments that members of the European Parliament wrote on each of them. 

The analysis suggests that lobbying has steadily ratcheted up in the Parliament over the past two decades, with the average number of amendments submitted per bill rising from term to term. The heaviest activity largely centered around a select group of hard-fought bills that typically involved a large number of committees — and hence lawmakers to influence.

Here are the top 10 most intensely lobbied pieces of EU legislation.

Tech tops the list

With four listings in the top 10, the European Union’s technology rule books are the biggest targets of lobbying action. 

The oldest law on our list, at number 6, is the bloc's flagship data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which saw a fierce lobbying fight between Big Tech giants and privacy rights activists in 2012-2016. 

Beyond stoking up policy fights, the GDPR did something else too: bring the full force of Big Tech’s lobbying firepower to Brussels. Companies like Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon built up massive lobbying machines in the EU’s center of power. 

It meant they were ready to swing into action when the first Ursula von der Leyen-led European Commission presented a series of hard-hitting technology laws seeking to beef up Brussels’ abilities to slap multibillion-euro fines on tech firms, ban digital services, change tech tools and carve up the biggest tech companies across the world. 

The Digital Services Act (DSA), proposed in 2020 and agreed on in 2022, tops the charts of EU laws with the most amendments in Parliament: it got more than 15,000 amendments during its drafting process. The law sets the rules for how social media moderate content on their platforms and is behind a first-of-its-kind investigation into wrongdoing by Elon Musk’s X. 

Third on the list is the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first comprehensive binding law seeking to curtail the booming technology — a law proposed in 2021 and agreed on in 2024, but which the European Commission itself is already seeking to soften due to fears that it hampers the tech industry too much. 

And at No. 9 is the Digital Markets Act, another flagship law proposed in 2020 that gives Brussels the powers to slice up Big Tech firms and impose fines for their dominance, and which has recently become a target of U.S. President Donald Trump’s ire. 

Green lobbying is vying for the throne

Earning the silver medal with just shy of 13,000 proposed amendments, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is a 2024 law that requires large companies doing business in the European Union to police their supply chains for environmental and human rights risks.

The law was mired in controversy from the start. Nordic industry lobbyists scored an early win when they forced the Commission to postpone its official proposal back in 2021. In the drafting phase, Big Business was vocal in its attacks against the rules, which also angered U.S. firms and had EU capitals rallying to exempt sectors like financial services from having to comply.

When the law was finally adopted, it took a mere six months for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to take out an ax and suggest cutting the rules as part of her deregulation drive. 

Supply chain rules aren’t the only green file to make the top 10. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — which came into force this year and aims to rein in pollution caused by an excessive use of disposable packaging by companies — triggered corporate lobbyists so much that negotiations on the file ended with an internal investigation over accusations of abusive behavior and security breaches in the Parliament. 

Further down the list but still with more than 7,900 amendments, the Just Transition Fund, proposed in 2020 and adopted in 2021, came under fire after some countries tried to make sure it could be used to finance natural gas infrastructure. The Fund hands out cash to regions negatively impacted by the transition toward a more climate friendly Europe.

Farmers and pitchforks

No one brings out the pitchforks in Brussels like Europe’s farmers — and the agribusiness players who profit from keeping things just the way they are. Few files drew more rural rage under the first von der Leyen Commission than the Common Agricultural Policy reform and the EU’s pesticide reduction law. 

The CAP Strategic Plans file became a bureaucratic battlefield after the launch of the EU’s Green Deal, racking up more than 8,700 amendments as MEPs tried to square environmental goals with keeping farmers happy. Many of the hard-won green compromises were ultimately scrapped after mass farmer protests last year — which raises the question of whether the fight was even worth it.

Meanwhile, the pesticide regulation — another Green Deal flagship — originally pledged to cut toxic chemical use in the EU by 50 percent by 2030. Instead, it was watered down by nearly 10,000 amendments from agri lobbyists and sympathetic MEPs. Protections for schools and hospitals? Deleted. Binding green rules? Gutted.

In the end, the law collapsed under its own compromises. Faced with blowback, von der Leyen pulled the plug on it last year. For the agri lobby, it was a win. For green lawmakers? A bitter harvest.

Money, money, money

Finally, two pieces of legislation in our top 10 show lobbying goes where the money is. 

A piece of legislation setting the rules on how the bloc’s largest funds would be spent during the current long-term budget period was one of the most heavily amended bills in the European Parliament. The European Union’s 2019 general budget, not included in the top 10 because it covered several subsections, also ranked high.

And with fights already gearing up over defense spending, CAP conditionality and how Europe’s poorer regions should spend money, the fight over how the next budget is formed is sure to be one that lobbyists will be keeping a keen eye on.