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This article looks at exits from politics and public administration into lobbying and highlights how they are shaped by the structural constraints and opportunities created by the specific characteristics of the state and the market. It is based on a corpus of 79 career paths of Polish and Czech commercial lobbyists with previous public sector experience. These bring us to highlight two specific structural constraints for the lobbyists’ trajectories – the key role played by party patronage practices in relation to the state apparatus and state-controlled companies, and the strong level of internationalisation of national economies, making multinational firms the dominant clients on the lobbying market. Additionaly, the high percentage of individuals who remain in lobbying over the period observed (2000-2023) suggests that lobbying can be seen not only as a possible opening for former public officials, but also more particularly as a way of staying “close to politics” from which it is relatively difficult to escape, given the structural factors that make returns both difficult and unattractive.