Data from 200 parties in 25 countries suggest that donations to hard-line groups have been on the rise in recent years, bolstering “war chests” ahead of European Parliament elections, the Guardian reports in an investigation.

A quarter of all private donations to political parties in the EU go to far-right, far-left and populist movements, boosting their finances by millions of euros ahead of crucial European Parliament elections next week, the report said. while special reference is made to Greece and the KKE.

According to a presented table, the left and far-left populist parties in our country get the “lion’s share” of non-public funding.

With opinion polls predicting a rise in support for hard-line conservative, Eurosceptic and pro-Russian parties, the Guardian and 26 other media outlets, led by research group Follow the Money, are publishing the Transparency Gap, the most extensive analysis of political finance in the EU.

The data shows that €150 million, the equivalent of €1 in every €4 of all private donations made between 2019 and 2022, went to populist parties and those with the most extreme political views.

Far-right groups have drawn more than 97 million euros, which are equivalent to 1 euro for every 7 euros of private money.

The project used the same party classification as the research group The PopuList, which defines the far-right as “possessing a nationalist and authoritarian ideology”.

While most countries oblige parties involved to declare their total income from private and public sources, the rules vary widely, and funding in some Member States is a “black box” explains the Guardian. Three-quarters publish no information or only some information about the people or businesses behind the donations.

There is a transparency gap even when parties follow their own country’s rules. The investigation found no signs of wrongdoing, but a major study commissioned by the European Parliament into political party funding concluded that a lack of transparency can lead to corruption risks.

In some countries, far-left parties have a large share of the pie. The Communist Party of Greece receives more than half of the country’s non-public funding, while its Portuguese counterpart, Partido Comunista Português over 50% of the total.

In most countries, government money is now the most important income stream, with non-government money accounting for less than a quarter of available funding in Spain, Hungary and Portugal, and just around 15% in Ireland and Belgium.

In other nations where private money dominates, government contributions are still significant. For example, in Germany and the Netherlands, public funding accounted for around 45% of the money received by political parties in 2022.

Following a landmark ruling by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court in 1992, the allocation of public funds to political parties is based on their “roots in society”.

“This means that political parties will always have to seek public support,” German authorities said.

“While all EU Member States have adopted regulations on the reporting and public disclosure of donations, the what should be reported and what should be disclosed varies considerably… there is often a striking discrepancy between the low reporting thresholds and the high disclosure thresholds, and the average threshold of €2,400 carries potential risks of corruption,” the report said.

“Nothing prevents parties from publishing more detailed information than the law requires,” said Fernando Casal Bértoa, an expert on European political parties and systems and associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Nottingham. “But hardly anyone does. The parties are not interested in transparency. They think that will limit them,” he observed.

When other forms of funding are included – namely donations from members, politicians or party officials – hard-line and populist parties raised a fifth of the money raised between 2019 and 2022; resources amounting to almost 500 million euros, the data show. For far-right parties, the amount was close to 200 million euros – 1 euro for every 11 euros.