Swiss Review 4/2019

Swiss Review / July 2019 / No.4 20 Politics Political advertising, such as for the Sover- eign Money Initiative, costs money – lots of money. But the Council of Europe says effec- tive, transparent rules are lacking in Switzer- land. Photo: Keystone STÉPHANE HERZOG Could Switzerland soon disclose the financing system for political parties and campaigns? This is the aimof the pop- ular initiative on transparency supported by the Swiss So- cial Democratic Party, the Swiss Green Party and the Con- servative Democratic Party (BDP). This initiative reflects texts already adopted byGeneva, Ticino andNeuchâtel, and more recently, Fribourg and Schwyz. Under this new ap- proach, partieswouldhave to communicate their campaign accounts and declare the source of donations worth over 10,000 Swiss francs. The current systemdoes not allow access to the details of amounts spent in campaigns or for election purposes. “There is a complete lack of transparency,” says Georg Lutz, director of the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences. For this reason, Switzerland is regularly singled out by the Council of Europe’s Group of States Against Cor- ruption (GRECO). “This group was originally set up to tackle corruption in Eastern European countries,” explains Andreas Ladner, director of the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration. In Switzerland politics is a private affair As successive GRECO reports lament, “there are no restric- tions on contributions” and “accounting documents of po- litical parties are… never subject to publication”. Indeed, in Switzerland, where there is no law governing political parties, this activity remains a private affair. “The parties often take the form of small, or even very small, associa- tions at cantonal and local level,” states GRECO. As a re- sult, the party machinery at federal level tends to have very limited resources. The Federal Council judges that “legislation applicable to all actors across the political sphere would generate a considerable administrative task and significant costs”. At the beginning of May, the Polit- ical Institutions Committee of the Council of States de- cided to support a counter proposal to the initiative, rais- ing the cap for non-anonymous contributions to 25,000 Swiss francs. Those in favour of a law on transparency have their eye on right-wing parties, and particularly the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), whose high-impact campaigns on subjects ranging from the entry of Switzerland to the European Economic Area to the banning of minarets, regularly receive substan- tial financial support fromtheir leaders, and not least from Christoph Blocher. “Howmuchmoney do I invest in an elec- tion campaign; what proportion of this amount ismade up of contributions and of personal resources? This ismy own Political campaign financing secrecy stirs jealousy Switzerland is regularly criticised by the Council of Europe for its lack of transparency surrounding campaign financing. Unevenly distributed resources are at the heart of the problem.