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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

Not sure where in Europe the author lives, but in Germany we absolutely have lobbying, "donations", "connections" and politicians meandering between corporations and public offices that are meant to regulate the same corporations, all without any consequences

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yes and bribing politicians was kind of legal in germany till 2024, yes two years ago! They even bragged till the 90s with how much money the got from industry because it meant they had a better reputation industriewise

this one is new https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__108e.html

edit:: honestly germany is maybe one of the most corrupt countrys in the world because it was not only legal but best practice to work with the professional advise of the industry.

Most corrupt in the world? Easy to debunk: It ranks on 10 (10th best) as per https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025 Do they need to do better? Absolutely!

> The CPI ranks 182 countries and territories worldwide by their perceived levels of public sector corruption.

Corruption perception index measures low-level everyday corruption, but ignores political corruption

Fine, let's take another dataset. There's also https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-corruption-inde... Germany is 8th best there, not the worst. I'm not arguing that there's no corruption, the country was a role model, or anything like that. That kind of post-fact accusation is not helpful, it's leading society in a dangerously wrong direction.

This just means that number 1 is also corrupt. OP is talking about the scale of none to complete corruption, not the relative rankings of all countries.

He was talking about the European parliament. The lobbying is organized and transparent there. But still some recent cases have demonstrated there remains some corruption.

European parliament has very little power, I wouldn't bother lobbying there too much anyway.

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