Most factories open in election campaigns
Frequent openings of factories, production sections, highways, and roads, laying foundations, and annunciations of the county’s progress – ribbon-cutting have marked every election campaign.
The officials abuse election campaigns ever since we got the multiparty system after communism, and they abuse the official function in a manner where it is very difficult to separate their role of state and their role of a party official. Money intended for state institutions, as well as money intended for political parties, is being used in campaigns.
The question is – is it possible to determine how much money did the ruling party really spend for the electoral activities financing?
The opposition, whoever it may be, always criticizes this abuse of public institutions for political gain of a party, but when they get elected, they do the same thing.
The law is clear
Article 29 Law on Anti-Corruption Agency:
The official cannot use public recourses, gatherings, and meetings where he participates and where he is invited as an official for political parties and political subjects’ promotion.
The official is obliged to unequivocally state to an interlocutor and to the public if he makes a statement in the name of the institution which he represents or a statement in the name of the political party, or a political subject.
Sub-article 4 of this Article does not refer to officials who were elected directly by citizens.
The current PM of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic criticized the leader of DS in 2012, and the President of the state of that time Boris Tadic, for abusing the function in order to promote the party:
“Tadic is going to have 20 minutes of prime-time every day for free, and we will have 5 minutes in the midnight period for 10.000 Euros, because it’s forbidden to appear from 6 A.M. to 9 A.M. and from 5 P.M. to 11 P.M..”
Democratic Party, whose former president was Tadic, now criticizes Vucic and the other members of the ruling coalition, for appearing in dual roles, as state, and as party officials.
The statistics of the ribbon cutting
In the last two weeks only, Aleksandar Vucic has, in the role of PM according to the website information of the Government, participated in 10 different activities like opening and visiting the factories, laying foundation stones. Today only, the PM visited two factories in Nis – in one there was the opening of new production hall and in the other one - the beginning of the renovation.
According to the analysis of the organization Transparentnost Srbija (Transparency Serbia), during the election campaign in 2012, when DS and SPS were the ruling parties, their activity was 17 times greater than at the same time last year. During six weeks before the elections in 2014, the officials of the time, and officials of SNS and SPS were 65 percent more active than in the same period in 2013.