How to Better Protect and Support Civil Society in the EU?

Over the past 15 years, civil society and civic activism in the European Union have been subjected to increasingly deliberate political, legal, and discursive attacks. While earlier EU policy responses largely conceptualized these developments through neutral or structural lenses—such as “shrinking civic space” or “democratic backsliding”—such framings are no longer adequate. The current contraction of civic space is not an anonymous structural process but the outcome of intentional political strategies pursued by identifiable illiberal actors operating simultaneously at the member state, EU institutional, and transnational levels. As a result, existing EU policies on civil society protection, enforcement, and funding risk being normatively ambitious yet operationally misaligned with the evolving threat landscape.

At the member state level, illiberal incumbents have increasingly targeted civil society as a core component of democratic checks and balances. Since 2017, dedicated anti-civil-society legislation has been adopted in Hungary and Slovakia, drawing on authoritarian blueprints and deliberately designed to generate chilling effects rather than to withstand judicial scrutiny. These laws exploit the weaknesses in the European Commission’s discretionary enforcement practices and the length of infringement procedures before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The resulting “life-cycle model” allows fundamental rights, most notably freedom of association, to be restricted for years before eventual annulment, after which new restrictive legislation is introduced. While the geographic scope of such laws remains limited, their replication potential and demonstrated effectiveness pose a systemic risk if left unaddressed.

At the EU level, the post-2024 political configuration of the European Parliament has introduced a qualitatively new top-down challenge to civil society. The erosion of the traditional pro-democracy consensus and the emergence of alternative center-right to illiberal majorities have resulted in intensified scrutiny of EU funding for civil society organizations (CSOs), particularly those engaged in advocacy. The establishment of parliamentary mechanisms targeting CSOs, combined with culture-war rhetoric previously associated with the illiberal radical right, has already had chilling effects beyond the parliament itself. Defensive reactions by the European Commission—most visibly in relation to civil society funding under programs such as LIFE, the EU’s funding instrument for environment and climate action—suggest that intimidation is influencing institutional behavior, with potentially far-reaching consequences for EU democracy-support policies.

Existing EU policies on civil society protection, enforcement, and funding risk being normatively ambitious yet operationally misaligned with the evolving threat landscape.

Externally, the abrupt termination of US democracy promotion and civil society assistance has created significant funding gaps in EU member states with illiberal track records and in EU candidate countries. These resources had long complemented EU instruments, particularly in sensitive areas such as electoral integrity and strategic litigation, which are often ineligible for EU funding. Their disappearance has exposed the structural limitations of EU member states’ reliance on funding models based on official development assistance and intensified competition for scarce resources at a time of growing geopolitical and fiscal pressure. Calls for the EU to “fill the void” left by the United States, while normatively understandable, are strategically unsustainable without clear prioritization.

In response, there is a need calls for a strategic recalibration of EU civil society policy along three lines.

First, the European Commission should strengthen its enforcement approach by introducing objective, transparent “trigger tests” in infringement cases affecting freedom of association. Drawing on established international human rights standards, such tests would oblige the commission to seek interim measures from the CJEU where serious and foreseeable harm to civic space is at stake, thereby neutralizing the life-cycle model of anti-civil-society legislation without undermining the commission’s institutional prerogatives.

Second, the EU should diversify and insulate its civil society funding architecture by extending the mandate of the European Endowment for Democracy (EED) to allow independent grantmaking within the European Union. As a pooled, quasi-EU mechanism operating outside the constraints of the EU budget, the EED could provide continuity, flexibility, and political insulation for democracy and civil society support in the event of increasing political contestation within EU institutions by the illiberal radical right.

Third, EU programming should increasingly complement targeted support for vulnerable groups with a robust whole-of-society approach to democratic resilience. While the protection of vulnerable groups remains indispensable, countering illiberalism requires broader engagement with societal majorities through democracy education, participation, deliberation, and depolarization. Without such a shift, EU civil society policy risks strengthening resilience at the margins while losing ground at the center of democratic politics.

Together, these measures would better align EU enforcement, funding, and political signaling with the realities of contemporary illiberal challenges and strengthen the union’s capacity to protect civil society as a foundational pillar of European democracy.

Daniel Hegedüs is deputy director of the Institut für Europäische Politik and a senior visiting fellow at GMF. He was until January 2026 regional director for Central Europe in GMF’s European Resilience Program.

This is the executive summary of the paper How to Better Protect and Support Civil Society in the EU? Illiberal Challenges to Civil Society, the Freedom of Association, and Civic Activism in the European Union, published in January 2026 in the framework of the AUTHLIB - Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response project.(It has been lightly edited from the original.)

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.