BERLIN, June 28 (Xinhua) -- German industry organizations and NGOs have expressed their commitment to greater openness and transparency in political lobbying in a joint position paper published on Friday.
The alliance, led by Transparency Germany and the German chemical industry association (VCI), "advocates a comprehensive lobbying law that does justice to all lobbyists but also to members of the parliament and elected officials".
All those who devote themselves to the representation of political interests should have to register in the lobby register, the associations demand in a joint key issues paper.
The register should also contain information on the fields of activity and the financial resources available for the representation of interests.
"With this surprising and broad alliance, we are demonstrating that the representation of interests is not an industry issue," said VCI director-general Utz Tillmann.
"We need a transparent representation of interests on the part of business and civil society and a publicly comprehensible weighing of interests on the part of politics and administration," stressed Hartmut Baeumer, chairman of Transparency Germany.
Other members of the new alliance for lobby transparency are the German Federation of Industries (BDI), the association of family entrepreneurs, the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (Nabu) and the federation of German consumer organizations (vzbv).
Sven Giegold, German member of the Green Party in the European Parliament, described the initiative as a great step forward.
"It is typical, however, that the lobby associations themselves are once again further ahead than the grand coalition," Giegold told the German newspaper Tagesspiegel.
The majority of Germans would also like more public transparency and control of lobbyism in Germany through a freely accessible register.
According to a recent study by the Berlin-based political research institute infratest dimap, 77 percent of Germans would support an open lobby register.
A stricter and more transparent lobby register was provided for in the drafts of the coalition agreement during the negotiations between the German conservative union CDU/CSU and the Social Democrats (SPD).
In the final phase of the coalition negotiations, however, under pressure from the Bavarian CSU, the paragraph on a lobby register was deleted.
