“You cannot measure side by side. Some parties have contributions from the state budget, but some do not. The law does not differentiate if you are a big party and have millions in state contributions, or if you are a small party in the municipality, which in principle comes to life only before the elections. The law must apply universally to everyone,” Petr Vymětal from the Office for Supervision of the Management of Political Parties and Movements justified the low fines.
The campaign for the House of Representatives has already started. Wild and unsupervised
Parliamentary elections
In total, fines in the amount of 739 thousand crowns became legal this year, according to information on the website of the supervisory authority. Most often due to non-compliance with the deadline for the delivery of the annual report or due to non-disclosure of information about the party’s sponsors. The highest fine was 50 thousand crowns, received by Senator Pavel Fischer for the presidential campaign in 2023.
According to Vymětal, high fines could be liquidating for a number of small parties and movements, of which there are almost 200 in the Czech Republic. “That party would rather cancel itself than pay a penalty. Then it is completely toothless and makes no sense. It must have an educational aspect,” he noted.
According to Vymětal, it is not possible for the authority to differentiate and fine large parties more and less small ones. “Then you cannot create parties of the first and second order and ‘salt’ the big parties, we would not stand for that in the administrative court,” he explained.
ANO and ODS received fines for negative campaigning
Large parties, which manage budgets in the order of tens or hundreds of millions of crowns, will not be affected by the fines. However, they also make a number of mistakes in their functioning.
The ANO movement thus had to pay 25,000 crowns for not supplying the campaign against another candidate with information about the contractor and processor in the regional elections. The ODS committed the same offense in the elections to the European Parliament, for which it received a fine of 10,000 crowns.
According to the office, Fischer committed a similar offense in the 2023 presidential campaign. He did not ensure that his campaign to the detriment of another candidate contained information about the sponsor and the processor, did not publish the required information about sponsors and did not send accounting documents to the office.
For the elections to the European Parliament, Svobodní received the largest fine, namely 40 thousand crowns. According to the supervisory authority, they also did not publish the required data on sponsors and donors. According to officials, the PRO and Přísaha movements made the same mistake, which received fines of 35 thousand crowns.
The state thus gives out many times more to political parties than it takes from them. Exactly how much it will be this year will be published by the Ministry of Finance in January 2025. However, for the year 2023, the state paid out almost 546 million crowns to the parties. The ANO movement received the most, over 140 million crowns, the ODS collected over 90 million crowns, the STAN over 72 million crowns, and the KDU-ČSL earned more than 53 million crowns. TOP 09 received the smallest contribution from government parties, which received almost 31 million crowns.
ANO and SOCDEM were fined by the supervisory authority for misconduct in the campaign
Homemade
