Editorial

The Elections Commission (EC) was in full flow this week explaining to the media how the new election laws pertaining to campaign financing work. On the eve of scheduled Presidential elections by October and an expected Parliamentary election to follow soon thereafter, this topic has always been brought up before an election and observed in the breach with gay abandon by all in the fray.

There is a free-for-all in funding political parties and candidates. The corporate big boys’, the wannabe millionaires and the village mudalalis alike hedge their bets by financing all parties—a ‘win and place’ as the term goes in the betting industry. They have ‘slush funds’ for such purposes; as insurance policies and investments for future business. Even foreign governments weigh in with ‘donations’, all well concealed and under the radar.

There is clear evidence of the relation between campaign spending and election outcomes. With the district-wise electorates under the proportional representation (PR) system, the bigger the territory to be covered, the bigger the resources required for parties and candidates. It doesn’t matter where they come from, as long as they come. These resources are largely unaccounted-for money.

In the recent Indian elections, the ruling party easily outspent its opponents. France has just announced an investigation into the Far Right leader’s 2022 presidential election campaign finances and allegations of embezzlement, forgery and fraud—and accusations that a candidate on a campaign accepted a loan. There is a separate National Commission of Campaign Accounts and Political Financing that keeps a tab on this.

Around 2007, a Ms. Bettencourt—the owner of the cosmetic giant L’Oréal—was accused of sending Euro 150,000 to the election campaign of President Nicolas Sarkozy and the legitimacy of his campaign was questioned at the time. She treated these donations as ‘charities’.

With campaign financing, a suitcase of cash is a suitcase of cash irrespective of whether it is from drug cartels or money launderers. And these monies are not given for the love of a candidate or a follower of a political ideology, but as an IOU to be encashed later in winning big tenders to clinching a big lentils, onion or sugar import deal. That is why political parties are the biggest bribe-takers in the country.

Election laws become farcical when it comes to monitoring campaign financing, and it is a reason for the honest individual candidate who is squeamish about collecting such under-the-table donations to come forward in elections nowadays. Given the amounts needed for spending at elections, especially when there is PR and a whole big district to be covered unlike a smaller constituency in the past, the reluctance is understandable. A Code of Conduct for candidates is nothing but a joke without any punitive action to follow.

Though a candidate can be disqualified if they exceed the spending limit, the onus is on the public to complain. If the EC is to initiate action they have to rely on the Police to start an investigation and the Attorney General to see if it is actionable in a court. Any action against the winners will be when ‘hell freezes over’.

One can hope that the Commission of Inquiry currently going into election laws that ought to align with contemporary requirements will, as the President’s Office points out, repair the breakdown of trust between politics and the people. Elections have been costly, of unlimited expenditure and corrupt.

Whether the EC pays only lip service to cracking down on election financing irregularities and is up to it to look into these aspects is the question. It never scrutinises annual accounts submitted by parties. Or is a French-style independent National Commission of Campaign Accounts and Political Financing the answer?

Delaying the hybrid voting

 

A cartoonist in a British newspaper caricatured a young boy showing his parents his maths exam results saying; “I got 35 percent. It’s a landslide.” The cartoonist was merely mocking the Labour Party’s victory of 421 seats out of 635 in the House of Commons (Parliament) with only 35 percent of the national vote at last week’s UK general elections which is being described as a ‘landslide’.

This discrepancy was most telling in the British election results for the Reform Party which received four million and 14 percent of the national vote and obtained only five seats while the LibDem Party received a lesser 12 percent of the national vote but won a thumping 71 seats. It was a complete distortion of the nationwide electorate and representation in its Parliament.

In India last month, the ruling BJP is also blaming the first-past-the-post (FPP) system despite emerging as the winner. It admits that its popular voter share nationally dropped by close to one percent, but then, its seat share dropped by a whopping 11 percent from 303 (2019) to 240 (2024).

Take the case of France just this week. It also has a FPP system, but the voter has two votes and unlike in Britain, it ended up with a hung Parliament. The three-cornered contest concluded with the United Left, the sitting President’s Centrists and the Far Right ending with plus or minus a similar number of seats. The Germans, however, have a hybrid system combining the FPP and the PR systems. The citizen is afforded two votes, one for an individual candidate and another for a party list. In a somewhat complicated counting mechanism, the number of individual MPs elected must correspond with the number of seats the party is entitled to.

Equally the PR system has done away with the electorate that provided citizens their own MP.

These show the abnormalities the FPP and PR systems throw up. Sri Lanka having faced these distortions has been trying to venture into the hybrid system of FPP plus PR as a more equitable reflection of the national vote in Parliament. While there is no guarantee that even such a system will rectify all the deficiencies in both the FPP and the PR systems, it seems a more equitable distribution of the public mandate in Parliament.

The Dinesh Gunawardene Parliamentary Select Committee of 2022 referred to all political parties acknowledging the need for a hybrid system. What then is the procrastination, the delay in implementing these reforms with a Parliamentary election bound to be called immediately after the October Presidential election, now that the likelihood of a snap General Election preceding a Presidential poll, is fast receding.

The next Parliamentary election, which will be very soon, must be on this hybrid system.