– In Poland there is simply a strategy in which more than 90% of the funds, from which political parties present in the Sejm, survive, comes from the state budget. Do you think that's a good solution?
– It's very good due to the fact that it's civilising policy funding. Thanks to this, we avoided the oligarchization of public and economical life, as we see in many another countries of the region: Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, not to mention Ukraine. Of course, our strategy is not perfect and requires many adjustments, order, increase transparency, and possibly besides the introduction of mechanisms to encourage greater support for the organization by its sympathizers.
– Can you tell me about these adjustments and the arrangements?
– Practically all organization starting to operate is circumventing the existing rules, as the founding conventions are financed by various external entities. There's no another way. So it's a founding crime. I believe that part of the budget subsidy should depend on whether the organization is able to get from tiny donors a crucial amount of money. Of course, large donors should be excluded from this mechanism. The current strategy has zero-one decisions by the State Election Commission, which make it possible to lose tens of millions of subsidies due to insignificant shortcomings. This should be a solution proportionate to the degree of blame. Finally, the issue of transparency. We have regulations which order the publication of payments of amounts above PLN 10 thousand, as well as the registry of expenditure. But they are not transparent enough, especially in the context of electoral campaigns, due to the fact that the biggest problem is not so much the backing of the organization but the campaign. Unfortunately, there are no penalties for non-compliance.
– In the last presidential election run we had many cases of violations of these rules by various mysterious abroad entities, which, via the internet, tried to influence support for individual candidates. This can be translated into concrete money.
– The same goes for elections to parliament. It was on a large scale that began in 2023 with the "desire" of Law and Justice, which, erstwhile proposing to hold a referendum on immigrants together with the elections to the Sejm and the Senate, opened the door to a large many irregularities, as the referendum rules are bad and inappropriate to the present reality. The beginning of this pathology was a referendum on our accession to the Union in 2003. Almost the full political class then feared that it could end in disaster and felt that practically any money, including abroad or State Treasury companies, could be utilized in the referendum campaign. And it's all legal. It has only been many years since then, and it has not occurred to anyone that these provisions should be changed. And in 2023, under the pretext of a referendum run for abroad money, a run was conducted “for” and “against” circumstantial political parties. To win the PiS referendum, he spent a large deal of money, coming from the Treasury companies, which proved ineffective due to the fact that the referendum was non-binding. The Jarosław Kaczyński organization shot itself in the ft at its own request and it dared various actors to conduct akin actions in the election run in 2025, which was observed primarily in the Trzaskowski campaign.
– Sam Trzaskowski, like his staff, refused to engage in these activities.
– It is said that the legislature is working to improve the provisions on referendums, which are to be based on the implementation of implementing solutions in line with European regulations. But it seems that no crucial organization is in a hurry. Politicians would like the work to fall on the PCW. The Commission replies that it has no competence, no resources, no people, no money. It seems that in this grey area we will stay for respective years.
– Most of the old parties that existed at the beginning of the transformation had their awesome office which she had to sale due to the fact that legally they could not gain from them, and the millions obtained from this title were over.
– However, any of these measures were transferred to 3rd parties. After all, we have formally existing parties that work around this property, as is the case with the Democratic Party.
– Among large parties, only the PiS found an effective solution to build its own financial backdrop. But it is rather modest.
– It's a very interesting story. During the times of Tadeusz Mazowiecki's rule, it was distributed to various political environments belonging to the PZPR Workers' Cooperative Press-Book-Ruch. In this way, Jarosław Kaczyński's environment became the publisher of the then-read "Evening Express". Kaczyński was most likely the only 1 who realized that there would be nothing from this publishing activity, sold the paper and invested these funds in the real estate. That's how Silver was built. These actions were legal, but not entirely transparent. present Silver is simply a relic of that time. It is simply a separate entity that is not within the structures of the party.
"The legislator did not anticipate the increasing importance of the Internet, so the run for campaigning to support individual parties through various mysterious external forces will increase.
– I think it could be worse all year, due to the fact that the number of cases of opaque backing or support for various parties in electoral campaigns will be increasing. The European Union is trying to come up with different regulations, specified as the European shield of democracy, but it does not seem to be effective. Just remind the presidential elections in Romania, where the results were decided by the TikTok campaign. It was considered a Russian intervention and repeated, but it turned out that 1 of the main parties considered that it would be in her interest to support a extremist candidate. It is as if the Civic Coalition unofficially supported the run of Grzegorz Braun, due to the fact that in this way it will harm the PiS. Unfortunately, specified events besides become a reality in alleged old democracies.
