Političke partije kao generator korupcije
Political Parties as a Generator of Corruption

Author(s): Jovan Ćirić
Subject(s): Electoral systems, Corruption - Transparency - Anti-Corruption
Published by: Institut za uporedno pravo
Keywords: GRECO evaluation; financig political parties; trading of mandate; morality; corruption
Summary/Abstract: To go in for politics, first of all, you need money. For the last election campaign in the USA it was spent more then 2 bilions of dollars. That fact by itself, speaks very much about different topics, about the relation between money and politics. In Serbia you do not need such a big amount of money, for the election campaign, but all problems about the relation between money and political parties are more obscure than they are in the USA. Bearing in mind that, the organization of the Councill of Europe for the fight against corruption, GRECO in the second evaluation of the situation in Serbia, found that the activity of political parties influences very much on the growth of the corruption. The word is about financing of political parties. That field of social life was completely unregulated for many years and nobody asked the simple question: how did you get money? In the time of Milošević, many political parties were financed from abroad and in the great part of publicity it was considered as something normal, legal, and positive. Because of that it is very difficult to say: it was OK yesterday, but now, today, it is not normal, it is not legal, it is not alowed to be financed from abroad. On the other side, great problem is the problem of sanctions against political parties. The question is how to punish one political party. The political liability and moral sanction are not effective. This article deals also with the problem: who is the owner of the mandate – the political party or the individual, the representative, the member of Parliament. Few years ago, the Serbian Constitutional Court decided that the mandate belongs to individual and not to the political party. That decision is in accordance with European standards, but new phenomenon, problem raises from that – the trading of mandates. There is also the problem of vote-buying – is it something illegal or not? It is legal problem – some kind of a fraud, but the biggest problem is moral problem. Politicians today are in the focus of publicity and it has great implications on the moral situation, on the moral crisis in one society. What is allowed to ordinary people, could not be allowed to politicians, said Aristotel. So, in this article, the author speaks about three groups of problems of political corruption – 1) financing political parties; 2) trading of mandate and vote-buying; 3) the negative influence of politician's behaviour on the social morality and the raising of general corruption.

• Details
• Contents