ACTIVITIES > Monitoring of Political Party and Electoral Campaign Financing >

Pilot - Project: Promoting Demcracy and Preventing
Corruption

Introductory Notes

Establishing democracy in Serbia is a slow process facing more obstacles than was the case in the majority of other post-communist countries in Central and South Eastern Europe . In the period 1990-2000, democratic forces in Serbia were focused on ensuring equal conditions for the candidates in the elections and on establishing regular electoral procedures, which proved to be an unreachable goal, since SPS having, under the name of SKS, achieved a monopolistic position before 1990 in the regime of «socialist self-government», continued after the establishment of pluralistic institutions to act as a monopolistic party. A thorough political change was achieved only on 5 October 2000, when autocratic regime of Slobodan Miloševic was overthrown, and SPS became just another political party, equal with the others. After this fundamental change, transparent financing of political parties became one of the priorities of the public interest. Such interest is understandable, because if sources of financing political parties and candidates in the elections are not known and limited, democratic institutions may turn into high finance service and the place of trading in influence.

The situation in this field, based on the legacy from the nineties, has a considerable effect on the implementation of the new legal solutions. Regardless of the regime change (2000), the participants on the political scene remained mostly the same until mid 2004, and it is unrealistic to expect that their behaviour would significantly change in a short period. The discussions in Serbian MEDIA today on financing political parties, particularly when mutual accusations of political opponents are in the background, are, as a rule, superficial and biased. They do not help in understanding the problem, but, as a rule, lead to a general disappointment in political parties, or even to lack of trust in all key democratic society institutions.

Democracy has its economic «price» and public should be acquainted with it. Legislator in Serbia has, since the beginning of 2004, accepted the standpoint that generous financing from the state budget may result in a reduced need of political parties to seek or accept private, frequently suspicious sources of financing.

Frankly speaking, such an attitude reduces the mentioned risk, but increases the danger of parties, guided by their partial interests, providing for themselves unreasonably high amounts from the budget, thus burdening the taxpayers. That is why the assessment [1] that enabling party leaders in the parliament to determine the amounts to be allocated from the budget for the party purposes is like giving alcoholic an opportunity to enter a bar with free drinks, may somewhat be exaggerated, but not entirely without foundation.

The approach of generous financing of electoral campaigns (and parties) was, for the first time, implemented in Serbia in the presidential elections in June 2004, therefore it is necessary to analyse thoroughly its effects. It is particularly important to examine the correlation between the electoral success of the parties and their financing from the state and private sources. Furthermore, it is impossible to avoid the question – dilemma whether in these elections, in spite of generous financing from the budget and from legally permissible private sources, the money and other resources from illegal sources were used as well.

The central point of this pilot – project is observing and analysing funding of the campaign for the election of the President of the Republic of Serbia (June 2004). Within this project, Transparency – Serbia has insisted on clarifying all ambiguous issues regarding the regulations governing financing of the campaign for the election of the President of the Republic, pointing out the shortcomings of the regulations and giving concrete suggestions for their improvement.

This project is particularly important because of the fact that, for the first time in Serbia , it has been attempted to carry out a complete monitoring of financing an electoral campaign. For that reason alone, this pioneer work may be useful to future researchers in, hopefully, continuous critical monitoring of one of the key processes both for combating political corruption, as well as for the development of a democratic society.

We would particularly like to express our gratitude to Westminster Foundation for Democracy that has understood these reasons and made implementation of this research possible.

Transparency – Serbia

September 2004

.............................................................................................................................................

[1] Lösche, according to: Robert Williams, «Aspect of Party Finance and Political Corruption» in «Party Finance and Political Corruption», 2000, London, Macmillan, p.7

ACTIVITIES > Monitoring of Political Party and Electoral Campaign Financing >