Ever since coming into its own, sometime in the 1990s, as a supranational arena distinct from the domestic fray of its member-states, the European Union (EU) has accustomed its conservative critics to sporadic bursts of outrage without much of a surprise factor. Emmanuel Macron eyes abortion as a fundamental right the bloc should guarantee? He reasons a sexual liberation crusade may help break the present deadlock of European integration. The Commission invokes dubious rule-of-law grounds to pare back Hungary’s share of the Covid-19 recovery fund? An internal enemy is of the essence when the fund’s net contributors up their payout. The Qatargate scandal unfolding as of this writing — with six suspects detained, €1.5 million in cash seized and a senior lawmaker stripped of her assignments — is the latest instalment in this saga: no doubt an enormity, but an entirely predictable one at that. As such, it should be read dispassionately.

Qatar and Morocco simply couldn’t miss their chance

If corruption is read as the meeting of supply and demand, the best the EU can do is keep its supply of corruption opportunities down to zero — and even that may be humanly unrealistic. It is even less realistic to expect foreign governments to forgo their demand of lobbying opportunities — even legally dubious ones — that usefully complement what is attainable through standard diplomacy. This is truer of governments who seek to deflect the limelight from their paltry human rights records by staying in the good graces of the EU, which they view as a clearinghouse of validation. With its boundless repository of opaque power, Brussels is to these governments an open invitation to lobby. Whilst the intergovernmental Council is largely lobby-free, the Commission and the Parliament offer influence-peddlers entry points aplenty. The former may daunt foreign dignitaries with its indecipherable technicalities and legal arcana, but the latter is the home of far more venal creatures.

Eva Kaili is a cookie-cutter Member of the European Parliament (MEP). Having risen through the ranks of Greece’s parliament as a national MP for the left-of-centre PASOK party, she became every foreign lobbyist’s ideal target the moment she became an MEP in 2014 — young, good-looking, without a clear thematic specialty and too ambitious to have much of a moral compass or an ideological spine. She then became one of the European Parliament’s (EP) 14 Vice-Presidents in 2019 (with 705 members and two official seats in Brussels and Strasbourg, the EP is presumably the world’s most expensive legislative chamber). With her portfolio encompassing the EP’s relations with the Middle East, she has been an invaluable asset for every country in the region: as a potential rapporteur (a bill’s author), a bill amender, a conference organiser or even a purveyor of laudatory speech clips at plenary sittings. Qatar and Morocco simply couldn’t miss their chance.

This scandal may just be the tip of the iceberg

This particular scandal is special in two ways. Whereas standard practice in the lobbying sector is to seek at least bipartisan — if not multi-partisan — campaigns, the suspects detained thus far in this case are all from the Socialists & Democrats (though from the party’s centrist faction, as a Spanish journalist from EFE was clever enough to pick up when he referred to Kaili, unironically, as a “right-wing social-democrat”). The S&D — along with the EPP, the liberals and the greens — talk a big game of fighting corruption, not least in rule-of-law renegade countries such as Hungary and Poland, whose governments must be rubbing their hands in glee at this windfall deflection from their own alleged shortcomings. Secondly, the scandal has already reached far beyond the Parliament (it may yet reach further still) and into the woke-humanitarian complex of progressive NGOs. Both the union federation ITUC and No Peace Without Justice (again, no irony) and have staffers implicated.

According to experts who have spent the past decade clamouring for tougher ethics rules in Brussels, this scandal may just be the tip of the iceberg. In a press release it issued in response, Transparency International’s EU branch speaks of a “culture of impunity” developed over decades, owing to “lax financial rules and controls and a complete lack of independent ethics oversight”. To be sure, the heightened media and public scrutiny warranted by this scandal may soon enough turn into a drumbeat for reforming the rules governing the disclosure of foreign lobbying activities in Brussels. Much like the resignation of the Jacques Santer Commission in 1999 led to a zero-tolerance approach to fraud under its successor, so this time may lead to more rigid oversight, such as through the long-stalled proposal to create an independent ethics body overseeing every EU institution with powers of enforcement and investigation. That would be good news, unequivocally.

For now, the implications cannot be overstated. The EU has long laboured under critiques of its democratic but not moral legitimacy. Up until now, the bloc had weathered one crisis after another — from migration to Brexit and from Covid-19 to the eurozone bust — whilst keeping the moral credentials of its leaders largely immaculate. Qatargate changes that. The scandal may rock the EU’s very foundations, portraying its leaders as decadent and self-seeking. Even if progress materialises, those hoping this will be the last such scandal are blind to the EU’s nature and will be sorely disappointed. The demand for corruption and influence-peddling is the inescapable outcome when so much power is concentrated beyond democratic accountability and media scrutiny. It will largely depend on the rule changes in the offing, whether the EU ends up supplying the venal lawmakers to meet that demand, but even under tougher ones, there could always be the odd Eva Kaili.