Europe to Monitor Macedonian Party Poll Funding

The head of the GRECO team in Macedonia, Slagjana Taseva, said possible misuse of state funds and institutions for electoral purposes and unaccounted donations would be the body's top concerns.

Similar problems occurred in the last general elections, she said. "In the 2008 election campaign, whole state institutions were literally transformed into party headquarters," Taseva explained.

She recalled cases of state institutions allegedly allowing the use of their assets, such as vehicles and offices, for election campaigning, and the use of state funds to print party T-shirts and other propaganda material. "It is unacceptable for employees paid by the state to engage in political campaigning in this way," Taseva noted.

In its report last year on the transparency of party funding in Macedonia, GRECO said that although the legal framework was "well developed and contains a number of strong features", in practice there was "a lack of effective implementation of the rules on political financing".
 
GRECO said the problem could be attributed to a "scattered and generally inefficient system of external supervision" that may lead to “possible infringements to the political financing rules not being prosecuted".

By law, political parties must submit financial reports before and after election campaigns, and submit details on all donors. Penalties are in place if a party is found to have spent more than is allowed by state-set quotas. In practice, whatever suspicions have been voiced by different observers, parties always manage to come clean.

Last year, GRECO sent 13 recommendations to Macedonia to be implemented by mid-2011. Taseva said they "would allow transparent and centralized monitoring of the finances".

The opposition Social Democrats have already accused Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, leader of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party, of continuing the practice of upping pubic spending in the pre-election period to win votes.

 "In just one month, they have spent a million euros," the Social Democratic vice-president, Gordan Georgiev, said, at a recent press conference. VMRO DPMNE has denied misusing state funds on campaigning.