Deputies in Mr Sarkozy's own party, lobbied by food producers and small shopkeepers, want to dilute the text.
Last year, this evolved into a powerful all-party lobby group called the National Conference of Governors (Conago).
The number of Romanians and Bulgarians to arrive in the UK next year may be as few as 20,000, according to a cross-party lobby group, Migration Matters Trust.
The very rich throw money at the parties, lobby groups and thinktanks that project their demands.
As interested parties lobby for and against the merger, one person will be pulling at the levers of power more often and with more influence than anyone else, according to both friends and foes: AT&T's chief lobbyist, James W. Cicconi.
Leaders of the governing parties lobbied hard in recent weeks to keep their representatives in line behind Mr. Wulff, with only limited success.
An extensive collection of links to sites about issues, political parties, lobbying groups and candidates and even a site to get financial disclosure reports for politicians.
The thesis was that Britain's electoral system had led to an overpowerful executive that ruled the country only nominally through debate in Parliament, and actually by the ruthless whipping of subservient members through their parties' lobbies.
In a 2007 hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Grassley described the fevered politics surrounding the 2003 Medicare changes, when many senators (from both parties) lobbied for higher payments to private plans.
The third-party lobbying groups that were the subject of the investigation said the prosecutors had accused wholly innocent individuals of crimes that did not exist under state law.
