Possible State financing for political parties

The Ministry of Justice is suggesting spending around 300 million UAH a year on financing political parties.  The authors of the draft law being prepared also wish to restrict the amount of donations for party activities and make these more transparent. Ihor Kohut from the Laboratory for Legislative Initiatives believes that this could increase public control over the Ukrainian authorities. He says: “This is an attempt to make parties less dependent on oligarchs and industrial groups which hold them on a financial string”.  He is convinced that Ukrainian society is ready to accept the European party system where the authorities bear responsibility for their words and do not promote political corruption.

For six years now there have been attempts to introduce State financing for political parties. However it has only been possible to obtain payment for electoral expenditure of those parties which got into parliament.  Moreover, Tymoshenko’s government has this year excluded this expenditure from the Budget.