Citizens pay 15.7 million euros for the election campaign

Citizens' money for elections

The 2022 united presidential and parliamentary elections hit a record for the amount of money the Serbian citizens paid to get convinced by the parties to vote for their lists and candidates. This year, the total budget allocations, which most parties led together for both types of elections during six and a half weeks, is 15.7 million euros. Very generous budget funding will have two consequences: the campaign will be more expensive, and participants will use other sources of income to a lesser extent, such as transferring money obtained to finance regular work from a permanent party account, real or fake donations and bank loans.

How much did anyone get from the budget?

According to the results published so far, the SNS will receive more than eight million euros from the budget to cover costs, the United for VIctory of Serbia (UPS) about 1.3€, the SPS about 820,000€, and the remaining opposition parties that passed the threshold between 768,000 and 869,000 euros.

Given data and estimates available so far, the impression is that after these elections and before the 30-day deadline for submitting the final financial report, a more significant number of participants will try to spend all the money they are entitled to from the budget (if they do not want to return part of these funds). Still, there will be those who will worry about finding legal funding sources for all costs incurred.

Campaign costs - TV, social networks, billboards

In this election, increased campaign presence through social networks and the Internet continued. Other forms of advertising are still used significantly, especially billboards. On the other hand, parties and candidates reduced the number of rallies and gatherings (compared to the elections before the pandemic) and the use of classic promotional material (posters, leaflets).

TV advertising is traditionally by far the largest generator of campaign costs, in which it participates with approximately half of the reported expenses. It seems that these elections were not significantly different in that respect either.

According to the estimate of TS, based on published price lists and discounts of national TV stations and major cable broadcasters, the total value of the recently completed television campaign for the national and Belgrade elections reached close to 7 million euros. SNS has achieved a distinct dominance in this type of advertising, with about 60% of total costs. The presidential and parliamentary election campaigns (which started two weeks earlier) were approximately the same value - about 3.2 million euros.

In the first three months of this year, which included the "campaign before campaign" that many participants led but did not include the first three days of April, about 400 thousand euros of the cost of political advertising in Serbia was registered on Facebook. Half of that amount refers to various orders openly supported by the Serbian Progressive Party. Interestingly, SVM follows with about 32 thousand euros of paid ads. Dveri and the coalition Moramo were also very active on this social network, and to a lesser extent UPS, NADA and Suverenisti. Some entities whose party profile was unclear also led the campaign worth over  35 thousand euros. Their ads aimed mainly to promote the city authorities' results in Belgrade or to campaign against opposition parties. The control of these unregistered campaign participants is not adequately secured or regulated.

The analysis of the data we collected in the monitoring so far indicates a significant increase in billboard costs. In the observed sample for Belgrade, the total number of billboards increased by 90% compared to the campaign from two years ago. When it comes to the number of ads of a political nature, they increased by 170% compared to 2020. The Belgrade elections being held in parallel with the national polls greatly influenced such a result. There was no increase in that volume in other cities where we monitored (Niš, Novi Sad, Novi Pazar).

Reporting irregularities

Transparency Serbia filed four complaints with the Anti-Corruption Agency for violating the Law on Financing Political Activities. The Agency has invested a lot of inventiveness not to provide answers or respond to what was not the subject of the application. In several cases, the Agency did not submit a decision but only a notification, so we filed a lawsuit with the Administrative Court and a complaint to the Protector of Citizens. The complaints referred to the use of one of the Serbian President's official Twitter account for the promotion of a political party (SNS), the promotion of the leading SNS pre-election brochure with official signs of the President, the use of web pages of ministries for statements in favour of or to the detriment of presidential candidates.

Preliminary financial reports of the parties

The introduction of the obligation to submit preliminary reports on campaign financing has somewhat increased transparency, but in a way that does not achieve the desired goal and can lead to erroneous conclusions. Instead of giving citizens an insight into the cost of the campaign before deciding on the elections, most of the reports became publicly available only in the afternoon of the last day before the election silence, so any serious analysis or discussion about them was impossible. The reports show the state of finances with a cut of 15 days before the elections. By this time, a relatively small part of the costs was paid - according to TS estimates, in these reports, we find only about 15% of campaign costs that will eventually be reported.

It is evident that the parties used different methodologies when presenting data in their preliminary reports when reporting deferred liabilities. Thus, these reports may lead to erroneous conclusions about the cost of the campaign (e.g. that the SNS and SPS campaigns were almost equal or only 16% of the money was spent on TV commercials, although the actual amount is around 50%). Five participants in the national elections did not submit reports at all (presidential candidate Miša Vacic and four minority electoral lists), for which fines were prescribed.