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Formulate polls campaign financing rules for level playing field among candidates: EU-EOM final report
An international election monitoring body yesterday called on the Government to formulate campaign financing rules, after they found some of the candidates had spent as much as Rs 300 million each, for their Parliamentary election campaigns in August.
Cristian Preda holds up thereport at a news conference. Pic by Amila Gamage
The European Union Election Observation Mission (EU-EOM) in its final report said the campaign finance rules will ensure a common level playing field among candidates.
They noted that the election campaign was very costly and some other candidates spent over Rs 80 million, while the average expenditure of a candidate from the main coalitions was around Rs 16 million.
EU-EOM Chief Observer, Cristian Preda said the report highlighted six priority recommendations to regulate the forbidden sources of financing, ceilings on donations and expenditure to enhance transparency among the public.
“It is up to Sri Lankan society and the politicians to decide on how much they should spend for the election campaign and other sectors. It is open for debate. We can only recommend to them,” Mr Preda said.
“Party and campaign finances are not regulated. The laws establish no limits on contributions or spending, and there are no disclosure requirements.
This results in lack of transparency and accountability, and does not contribute to a level playing field between candidates, contrary to international standards for transparency of campaign finance,” the report noted.
Mr. Preda said there are no such perfect models in place in any of the country that can be copied from but society can push politicians to adopt a mechanism which puts check and balances for transparency in their election campaigning and propaganda activities.
“As candidates covered their own costs with little or no support from the party, only those with access to financial resources could afford to mount a high profile campaign. Only the UNP and SLFP led coalitions were able to avail fully of the opportunity to set up offices in all villages, excluding areas with large Tamil populations. The JVP was the only other party that also visibly campaigned in the majority Sinhala areas across the country. However, their candidates’ activities were much more low key.”
Following an invitation by the Election Commissioner, the EU-EOM engaged in election monitoring at the recently concluded Parliamentary elections, after 10 years.
The findings were based on information submitted by the 85 EU observers who were deployed across the country and they are independent in their findings and conclusions.