2023-06-18 05:01:57
Did you know that nothing in the constitution defines the existence or purpose of political parties? This observation greatly surprised the members of the recent citizen panel “We Need to Talk” whose purpose was precisely to make proposals for the reform of party financing.
Audrey, one of the participants in the panel testifies: “we were asked to think regarding how to finance the parties… so we said to ourselves that the ideal would be to define the financing according to the missions of the parties, it was then that we discovered that nothing, in reality, in the law where the constitution did not really mark out these missions“.
Confirmation with Jean Faniel, the director of CRISP who underlines this paradox: “It is customary to say that Belgium is a particracy, a country where political parties play a decisive role in decision-making… and at the same time the law says almost nothing regarding parties, except for the law of 1989. on financing“. Indeed when we read this law, it gives a rather broad definition: “A party is a “association of natural persons, with or without legal personality, which participates in the elections provided for by the Constitution and by law, which presents candidates in each (electoral constituency) of a Community or Region and who, within the limits of the Constitution, the law, the decree and the ordinance, attempts to influence the expression of the popular will of the manner defined in its statutes or its programme.”
So for Jean Faniel: “Today, if a political party wants to invest in real estate (this is for example what the N-VA did) the law does not prohibit it. One might imagine a political party that would like to buy a football club. If you read the 1989 law, it is not prohibited. If a political party decides to buy an amusement park, for example, for the moment, the law does not prohibit it “.
Clearly, the parties can use their substantial resources pretty much as they see fit. “If you look at the Socialist Party or the Vlaams Belang, for example, you have totally contrasting strategies“says Jean Faniel once more. “The PS uses a lot of money for its research center, the Emile Vandervelde Institute. So it has significant staff costs, not only at the national level of its headquarters with the IEV, but also in the federations district. On the Vlaams Belang side, we have absolutely no or very little personnel expenditure. The vast majority of resources are invested in communication, in propaganda.”
If you want to find out how party financing works, how citizens took up this issue and the recommendations that emerged from their work, take the time to listen to the 48 minutes of the “The Turning Point” Podcast on audio and on all your download platforms.
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