Budgetary financing of campaigns – modest amounts, not planned in time
Of the ten cities, municipalities, and city municipalities where regular elections will be held on March 29, 2026, only Knjaževac clearly indicated how much it will allocate for financing the election campaign, while Sevojno is the only municipality that has calculated the total allocations for party financing during the budget year in accordance with the Law on Financing Political Activities – shows an analysis by Transparency Serbia.
TS’s analysis shows that the authorities in Kula, Aranđelovac, Bor, and Bajina Bašta “forgot” that regular elections would take place in 2026 when they adopted this year’s budgets. An even more drastic case is Kladovo, where a budget revision was made after the elections were announced (March 5, 2026), but mandatory legal costs for campaign financing and election implementation were still not provided. In Smederevska Palanka, Majdanpek, and Lučani, funds for campaign financing were allocated, but in insufficient amounts. The missing funds will therefore have to be paid from budget reserves.
The data on the amounts to be distributed confirm how valid the warnings we gave when the Law was adopted were – that the system of budgetary allocation does not ensure conditions for equal competition among election participants. This particularly affects local citizen groups facing large parliamentary parties as opponents. Differences in financial capacities are especially evident in situations like the current one, where a significant part of the campaign is conducted through national media.
While the Law allows parliamentary parties to use funds from the national budget for local campaigns to cover their regular activities, i.e., everything that is not an election campaign (over €18 million annually), other participants receive very modest support from local budgets, if it is provided at all. In Sevojno, each of the four submitted candidate lists will receive a negligible 3,204 dinars before the election. In other municipalities, the amount that should be distributed per list before the election ranges between 49,000 and 98,000 dinars, and only in Bor (216,187) and Aranđelovac (114,662) is it slightly higher.
Preliminary campaign expenditure reports confirm that the possibility of financing local campaigns from the national budget was utilized – SNS transferred a total of 35.2 million dinars from its regular account for campaigns in ten municipalities, SDPS 1 million dinars, and several opposition parties 449,000 dinars. More details on the preliminary reports are provided in a separate statement.
The larger part of the budget money for campaigns is distributed afterward (60%), based on the mandates won. Calculations show that a list winning around 20% of mandates could receive between 115,000 and 220,000 dinars from the municipal budget to cover campaign costs, in Aranđelovac 282,000, in Bor 670,000 dinars, and in Sevojno a more than modest 7,250 dinars
