Framing Corruption in the European Parliament: Shifting Narratives after the War in Ukraine
On 9 December 2022, Europe was shaken by images of cash-filled suitcases and the arrests of European Parliament Vice-President Eva Kaili and former MEP Antonio Panzeri. Quickly dubbed “Qatargate,” the operation exposed a cash-for-influence scheme, in which the governments of Qatar and Morocco allegedly bribed European co-legislators to promote their interests within the European Parliament (EP), including shielding Qatar from criticism over human rights violations in the run-up to the FIFA World Cup. Three years later, Belgian police again raided multiple locations in Brussels over suspicions that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei had bribed European lawmakers with cash gifts and luxury trips (Freund, 2025).
These cases were not simply individual anomalies or exceptions. They revealed an underlying systemic problem: the vulnerability of European financial and political systems to infiltration by foreign actors seeking to bypass democratic processes in order to advance their interests, a phenomenon increasingly described as strategic corruption. While these vulnerabilities had long existed, they were arguably overlooked until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed how weak and uneven anti-corruption laws across the EU Member States could be exploited by foreign actors to expand their influence within EU borders. This article thus investigates how the public narrative of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) on corruption have shifted following the war in Ukraine.
European policymakers have long recognized corruption as a European policy problem. Yet, they diverged on the appropriate course of action. While Member States envisioned limited integration in areas with clear cross-border implications, where cooperation was perceived to serve their common interests, supranational institutions like the EP advocated deeper integration, ranging from broad criminal law harmonization to European enforcement mechanisms.
As criminal law has traditionally been regarded as a matter of national sovereignty, the introduction of supranational tools against corruption in Member States has been challenging. Despite having limited impact on the outcome, the EP often pushed the Commission and the Council to introduce ambitious tools to curb Europe’s corruption problem. However, advocated tools have often lost their teeth during negotiations due to persistent dissensus on where should power lie in anti-corruption governance.
MEPs’ discursive strategies in pushing for more assertive EU action have primarily rested on underlining the cross-border implications of corruption, that corruption wastes common budget, undermines liberal democratic values, and threatens the internal security. With the war in Ukraine, the nature of security threats and its relation to corruption have changed in broadly four ways.
First, the referent actors shifted from non-state to state actors. Until 2022, when linking corruption to security, MEPs primarily focused on organized crime groups, such as the mafia, human and drug trafficking networks, and terrorist organizations, and the ways in which they used corruption to finance their operations. After the war, the responsible actors shifted to foreign governments, particularly to Russia, pursuing strategic objectives through the corruption of European politicians. The threat was no longer covert criminal networks but with visible state-linked actors who exert influence within the EU through oftentimes legal ways such as investing in real estate to obtain EU citizenship or by hiring European policymakers to major Russian companies.
Second, such security considerations became a legitimization strategy employed by MEPs to advance robust EU tools against corruption. The analysis of MEP speeches of the last decade shows a visible increase in MEPs’ resort to the war as a way to push through previously failed anti-corruption measures, such as ban on citizenship by investment schemes or the long awaited Anti-corruption Directive. As Renew MEP García Hermida-Van Der Walle put forward: “There will be no more rolling out the red carpet for Putin’s cronies and other corrupt people trying to access the EU to launder their money… We can ban all sorts of golden passport schemes forever within the European Union. And, maybe more importantly – also for the long term – I’m asking the Council, the Member States, to please, please, please allow us to have an anti-corruption directive in the European Union with real teeth.”
Third, security threats have started to be combined with democratic considerations. Previously, organized groups only threatened the physical security of the Union by engaging in criminal activities often sustained by corruption. Now, corrupt actors also threaten democratic decision-making in the EU often by channelling resources to pro-Russia media outlets in the EU. In this way, foreign influence was portrayed as capable of undermining democratic institutions and political decision-making.
Lastly, foreign influence and concerns for strategic corruption have started to be utilized by not only-pro EU political groups but also Eurosceptic MEPs. While the former used these threats to justify stronger supranational tools, the latter used it for opposite means: less EU intervention. They argued that current problems were because of the EU’s interventionist policies that created bureaucratic burdens and regulatory complexity that facilitated corruption.
They also criticized what they perceived as the EU’s “hypocritical” approach to corruption, arguing that it selectively targeted conservative governments while overlooking how EU-funded NGOs or liberal policymakers can also become targets of strategic corruption.
In sum, geopolitical developments not only affect the Union’s security architecture but also its anti-corruption policies. This article thus demonstrated how corruption is politically framed and debated in the European public sphere in an era of growing geopolitical instability. Understanding the evolving relationship between corruption and security in this context enables policymakers not only to develop more nuanced policy instruments that respond to emerging realities, but also to recognize how security-related corruption narratives can be mobilized to advance pro as well as anti-EU positions and to respond to the variety of arguments more effectively.
I believe that the EU joint approach to tackle corruption is the correct path.
Despite the Qatargate and Ukraine cases, the EU Anti-Corruption Directive took years to adopt (2026) with transposition delayed to 2028, creating a severe alignment lag with existing legal frameworks (e.g.. AML and EPPO).
At the same time, corruption investigations over focus on the corrupted officials while giving comparatively less attention to the ultimate corruptor and the strategic objectives behind them.
Future anti-corruption efforts should adopt a broader, EU harmonised intelligence-led perspective, treating corruption as potential enabler of organised crime and hostile foreign influence rather than as an isolated offence.