Guest article: How much will we pay to political parties in the new parliament?

In the days following the parliamentary elections, the public debate focused on two main topics – the distribution of parliamentary seats and the possible coalition of the four parliamentary parties, and the scandal surrounding the printed ballots. These two topics successfully displaced one of the interesting leitmotifs of the election campaigns – the financing of political parties from the state budget.

Many organizations have rightly called for the change or complete elimination of this type of subsidy, but none of them has managed to gather sufficient public support and find its place in parliament; therefore, there is no reason to believe that this model will change in the near future.

Today, when we have the final results of the parliamentary elections, we can take stock of how much money from the taxpayer's pocket will go to finance these political structures. The Law on Political Parties[1] proposes that subsidies should be received not only by parties represented in parliament, but also by those that received more than 1% of the vote in the elections. Since this rule does not apply to coalitions, unless they are part of parliament, 9 parties and one parliamentary coalition, namely the Coalition for Bulgaria, will be entitled to state funding. According to the Law on the State Budget for 2013, the value of the subsidy is 12 leva per vote received[2].

Therefore, parties that have crossed the 1% threshold will receive a total of 34.8 million leva per year, and for the four years - if we assume that the value of the subsidy will not change over the years - 139 million leva.

For comparison, the annual support of the parties in this form is approximately equivalent to the annual subsidy of the Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" or the value of one lot of the highways so praised by the previous administration. However, it is obvious that the financing of political parties is a priority.

More worrying, however, is the large number of parties that will receive subsidies while this parliament exists, even though they will not perform any representative functions, and obviously the purpose of their funding is to survive until the next elections - these 6 formations are allocated a total of 5.4 million leva per year, for which they are not expected to carry out any activity. In other words, by funding them, the state is concluding a very bad deal in which it gives a lot of money, in return for which it does not receive any product - or, to put it more crudely, for the next four years we will be paying for Svetlyo Vitkov and his ilk from our own pockets. This model creates an extremely vicious practice, namely the creation of parties and participation in the election campaign not with the aim of achieving representation and participation in government, but solely in pursuit of subsidies. Practice shows that in Bulgaria, winning votes with strong populist statements that are not supported by a real political program and management vision is quite easy, and let's not forget that to get the subsidy, the People's Voice Party needed only 43 thousand votes, and the Bulgarian People's Party - 69 thousand. In this way, elections are becoming a business, conveniently financed by the state budget, which is at work for a few months every four years.

It is untenable to claim that attempts are being made to optimize state spending, while at the same time 35 million leva per year are being spent unaccountably on financing party structures that can easily support themselves. There are several different approaches that can be applied by parties that truly aspire to parliamentary representation:

• Membership fees: commitment to a certain political structure implies a certain attitude towards its principles and goals, and in this sense a minimal financial contribution to the party's budget would not be unacceptable. This principle finances professional organizations that perform functions similar to those of parties - they concentrate similar interests;
• Sponsorship: It is an open secret that most parties advocate for the positions of certain business interests. Formalizing these relationships will not only bring them to light, but will also help its development in the form of "corporate advertising";
• Fundraising: individual political goals of parties can also become a source of revenue, in the form of fundraising campaigns to achieve a certain result;

The implementation of these methods – without conflicting with the current legislation regulating the activities of political parties – will simultaneously allow them to operate independently of the state budget and alleviate this unnecessary burden on the budget. Separately, the elimination of subsidies will put an end to the practice of “subsidy chasing”.

Did you like it? Take a minute to support the EKIP on Patreon!