As June’s European elections draw nearer, espionage and foreign interference allegations have flooded the last plenary session of the European Parliament, but the outrage is likely to continue overshadowing public debate not only during the campaign, but after the dust settles, writes EURACTIV.

“Qatargate, Russiagate, and now ‘Chinagate” have all rocked the last plenary session of the Parliament, sending MEPs into a slight panic.

On Thursday, MEPs approved the creation of an EU ethics body, conceptualised in the wake of the QatarGate scandal, which aims at preventing wrongdoing by elected or appointed officials by standardising and monitoring ethical guidelines across EU institutions. However, an ethics body with no sanctioning powers is hardly a solution.

“We really have to be honest to ourselves. (…) Even if all of these allegations are true, these are criminal offences, and these are offences that are punished with prison sentences, so if people are ready to violate criminal law and face a prison sentence, you won’t keep them by installing an ethics body or ethics rules or anything like that. We must face that”, - Vice-President of the Parliament and German Socialist leading MEP Katarina Barley told Euractiv.

While the cases are still in the hands of judicial authorities, disturbed lawmakers have rushed to call for further internal reforms to strengthen security despite recently approving a watered-down reform post-QatarGate in September 2023.

Now, MEPs are calling again for heightened security clearance for staff, politicians, and journalists - but their outcry will fall on deaf ears, at least until July, as the Parliament is set to wrap up its work this week.

But the noise around the cases is set to continue as more information and details are expected to emerge.

Meanwhile, political forces from EU countries where far-right forces are on the rise will certainly use them as campaign ammunition. Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who is at the forefront of battling Russian interference, is facing a tough battle against Vlaams Belang ahead of national, local, and European elections.

Interestingly enough, one of the first tasks from the fresh new batch of MEPs in July could be to strip some of their colleagues’ immunities on their first day.

Tobias Teuscher, spokesperson of ID group which is at the epicentre of the recent scandals, did not want to speculate on potential new cases within his ranks: “You never know,” he told Euractiv.

“We are navigating like in a ship with fog around, and we don’t know exactly where the next cliff will come up suddenly,” - he added.

He argued that ID MEPs had been fooled by Voice of Europe, the epicentre of the recently-revealed Russian propaganda network, as they appeared on their website abundantly: “The success of Voice of Europe is certainly that they’re playing the game of the nice guy. As a politician, you are used to having only nasty questions from journalists who are only having the agenda to harm you. Then you are in a certain way very happy if you have a media that comes and is not nasty”.