Skip to content
← Insights
Lobbying05 Apr 2026·9 min read

Who lobbies whom: network of 3,412 disclosed meetings

Every Commissioner meeting disclosure since January 2025 — mapped as a network. The results show a small cluster of organisations with outsized access.

ByTobias Merk
3,412
disclosed Commissioner-level meetings in 15 months
12
organisations account for 30% of all meetings
€2.1B
total declared lobby spend by top 50 organisations

The meeting map

Under the European Transparency Register, Commissioners are required to publish all meetings with lobbyists and interest representatives within two weeks. We have ingested every such disclosure since January 2025 — 3,412 meetings across 21 Commissioners and their cabinets.

Modelled as a bipartite network — organisations on one side, Commissioners on the other — a small number of nodes emerge with dramatically higher degree centrality. BusinessEurope leads with 47 disclosed meetings, followed by the European Round Table of Industrialists (38) and the European Banking Federation (31).

Top 20 lobby organisations by Commissioner meeting count
BusinessEurope
47
ERT
38
EBF
31
DIGITALEUROPE
28
CEFIC
26
Insurance Europe
24
ACEA
22
Eurelectric
21
Copa-Cogeca
19
AmCham EU
18

Access concentration

The top 12 organisations — representing less than 0.4% of registered entities — account for 30% of all disclosed meetings. This concentration is higher than in the comparable period of the previous Commission, when the top 12 held 24% of meetings.

Civil society and NGO access is markedly lower: the top environmental NGO (WWF European Policy Office) ranks 34th by meeting count. Consumer organisations rank even lower, with BEUC at 41st.