Although the new EU Party Financing Regulation is actually a sub-topic of the widely discussed European Constitution, officials have so far been rather quiet in this regard. The Regulation declares artificially created bodies called `party alliances' as political parties for the sole purpose of enabling subsidies from the EU budget to be paid to the European umbrella organizations of the established parties. The Regulation violates almost every principle of appropriate and legitimate public funding of political parties. Such principles have, for instance, already been drawn up by the German Constitutional Court and the Council of Europe.
