Beggars with mandate
The government is going to discuss the issue of providing support to political parties having collected 3 or more per cent of votes during parliamentary elections. The draft law that was initiated by the finance ministry has been developed based on the law on parties and its article 27-2/3 and the Central Electoral Commission’s information about the number of votes collected by alliances of parties and political powers during parliamentary elections.
According to this project, the government will provide 18.2 million drams to the RPA, 12.4 million to the PA, 2.9 million to the ANC, 2.3 to the ARF and Heritage parties and 2.2 million drams Legal State party. In total the budget will give 40.6 million drams (100,000 dollars) to political parties. This is ridiculous, especially for the RPA and PA. It may be even humiliating for the PA and RPA to accept such money. However, this principle of supporting political parties is used in many developed countries. The goal of this support is that political parties, notwithstanding their political affiliation, are considered to be the servants of the society and important institutions for the society, thus tax payers are paying to develop their institutional capacity. If this was the case, it would be very good to do this even if the budget was in crisis.
However, the question is that if the society really finds these parties as their servants and whether they really believe that they work for their interests so that they can pay them for their work from the money generated from their taxes. During the past parliamentary election even the most opposition parties set foot in the parliament and agreed to take the mandates resulted from falsified elections, and their presence in the parliament serves more for the interests of the people on power than the interests of the society.
The authorities are doing the same thing as they would do in case of no opposition. The opposition, with their presence in the parliament, are legitimizing the actions of the government by making our parliament the most democratic one in the region. And all this is being done on the account of the past trust of the society and their money.
