While digital, climate and foreign policy have grabbed the headlines in the opening month of Ireland's EU Council Presidency, another key file could define Dublin's tenure: tobacco control. As reported in mid-July, the start of the Irish Presidency saw over 280 of the country’s diplomats and officials instructed to avoid meetings with tobacco companies seeking to influence emerging EU tobacco policies.

BY GUEST AUTHOR

As Dublin has rightly emphasised, this guidance reflects Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), which requires governments to shield health policy from commercial interests.

Events only weeks earlier showing why such safeguards matter. Made public in late June, a recent letter from Philip Morris International (PMI) called on Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to bring tobacco within the EU’s competitiveness agenda and place the industry on the same footing as other legal sectors during the revisions of the Tobacco Products and Tobacco Excise Directives (TPD and TED), drawing criticism from WHO-aligned public health organisations.

Against the backdrop of the European People’s Party’s (EPP) recent compromises with the far-right in the European Parliament’s opinion on tobacco taxation, the stakes are unmistakable. Will Parliament keep accommodating an industry linked to 700,000 deaths in Europe each year, or join the European Commission and Irish Presidency in delivering ambitious reform that puts citizens’ health first?

EPP’s far-right alliance threatening tobacco control ambition

With the Commission now several months into work on the long-delayed revisions of the TPD and TED, the ambition of Europe’s next tobacco rules is already under pressure in the Parliament. Once a pillar of the EU’s  “Grand Coalition” with the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and Renew Europe, the EPP has increasingly accommodated the far-right Patriots for Europe, led by Jordan Bardella, whose positions closely echo tobacco industry demands. The contradiction is stark for a party that claims to support Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan and its goal of reducing tobacco use below 5% by 2040.

This dynamic became impossible to ignore in June, when Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON) backed a damaging opinion on the proposed tobacco-tax reform after the EPP joined forces with the far-right, this time to deliver concessions long sought by the tobacco lobby. César Luena, S&D’s negotiator on the TED file, condemned the outcome as “deeply harmful to public health, taxpayers and every European whose life could be saved through bolder action against smoking,” adding that the alliance had hollowed out the reform by lowering minimum tax rates, lengthening transition periods and weakening the mechanism designed to keep the Directive effective over time.

Two weeks later, on 17 June, Parliament rejected the weakened ECON committee report led by Czech MEP Tomáš Kubín and failed to adopt a formal position in Strasbourg. According to the S&D, this report, favourable to the tobacco industry’s positions, was “prepared by the far-right in close cooperation with the European People’s Party (EPP).” The outcome fell short of political leadership, particularly as stronger amendments from the Left, Renew, the Greens and S&D were also defeated. Nevertheless, leading tobacco control actors such as the Smoke Free Partnership noted that blocking an industry-friendly compromise preserved room to restore the Directive’s public health purpose.

Big Tobacco lobby running amok with far-right cover

June’s votes exposed more than a temporary parliamentary setback, showing how deeply tobacco interests remain embedded in EU lawmaking through decisions driven exclusively by financial considerations and profoundly irresponsible from a public-health perspective, with parliamentary sources reporting that some amendments echoed lobbyists’ arguments almost word for word. Coinciding with the preparation of the TED and TPD reforms, Big Tobacco has increasingly concentrated its firepower on Europe’s resurgent right, betting that far-right and conservative allies can dilute rules designed to bring EU policy closer to its WHO FCTC commitments. 

The scale of that campaign is striking: between June 2024 and October 2025, tobacco representatives secured 220 meetings with MEPs, primarily centred on the TED. The EPP recorded 73 encounters, unsurprising for Parliament’s largest group; however, the 38 meetings with the Patriots for Europe and 49 with the ECR reveal where influence is expanding. PMI has been particularly aggressive, holding 96 of the 220 meetings, with British American Tobacco (BAT) and Japan Tobacco International (JTI) securing 46 and 16 meetings, respectively.

Earlier this year, health advocates and MEPs urged European Parliament President Roberta Metsola to tighten safeguards, educate newly-elected members about their obligations and introduce a dedicated registration regime for tobacco lobbyists. Discouragingly, Metsola has deflected responsibility, pointing to procedural hurdles and arguing that reform would require changes to Parliament’s rules of procedure that lie with the Constitutional Affairs Committee.

Shielded by this right-wing support, the industry has increasingly recast itself as a key partner in Europe’s industrial competitiveness agenda in recent months, highlighting its investment, job creation and manufacturing capacity in member-states. This narrative has found receptive audiences in countries such as Italy, Greece, Romania and Hungary, where tobacco companies have invested billions and gained leverage in Council negotiations – including around the Cypriot Presidency’s weakened TED compromise text. The industry also exerted considerable influence over the Commission’s first call for evidence on the TPD, which closed on 15 June after receiving 82,000 submissions, many of them echoing narratives that, in some cases, had been supplied directly by tobacco manufacturers.

EPP’s moment of reckoning

Amid this new lobbying wave, Brussels must urgently shore up its defences and prevent industry interests from capturing the policy process as they did in the TPD’s 2014 revision, when tobacco lobbyists secured the removal of a WHO-aligned independent tobacco traceability system.

As the S&D has rightly highlighted, the Parliament’s rejection of the far-right-backed taxation report in June marked “a step in the right direction,” yet hardly a convincing victory. Ireland, alongside France, Belgium and the Netherlands, has become one of Europe’s strongest tobacco-control voices, and its EU Council Presidency now offers a rare chance to turn that resistance into ambitious reform that protects citizens.

In the coming months, the Irish Presidency will need to work closely with key MEPs to build an EPP coalition capable of resisting the party’s far-right drift and defending higher cigarette duties, new taxes on novel products, such as vapes and heated tobacco, and genuinely independent tracking of the bloc’s rising illicit trade – a scourge that Big Tobacco continues to enable and profit from at the expense of public health.

At the top of the group, EPP chair Manfred Weber and vice-chair François-Xavier Bellamy are well placed to shift the party’s political direction on tobacco control. Meanwhile, SANT chair Adam Jarubas and committee member Tomislav Sokol can bring the public health case to the centre of the debate, while Irish FISC vice-chair Regina Doherty, alongside ECON members Markus Ferber and Fernando Navarrete Rojas, can reinforce the fiscal argument. This collective intervention could prove decisive in determining whether Europe defends citizens’ health or once again yields to commercial interests.

Ultimately, the true measure of Ireland’s Presidency will be whether it can convert political momentum into durable European action. By forging a coalition strong enough to withstand industry pressure, Dublin can help deliver the most consequential overhaul of EU tobacco policy in a generation. Anything less would squander a rare opening to prevent another decade of avoidable harm.