What was supposed to create transparency creates apparent transparency.
Is this what transparency looks like? Wallpapered wall in Bern.
Alessandro Della Valle / Keystone
They wanted to create transparency and created bureaucracy. Under pressure from the transparency initiative, parliament decided three years ago that parties would have to disclose their funding in the future. Posters for the initiative had read: “Who is paying for this poster?” It all sounded well and good.
The reality is different: This week, the Federal Audit Office presented the first transparency report on party financing. It revealed that the SP earned more than nine million francs in 2023 – more than all other parties, by a long way. Contrary to what it likes to suggest, left-wing politics is not an underdog, but a multi-million dollar business. The SP was and is in favor of these transparency rules. But of course the SP is now putting these figures into perspective. And not without reason.
All the figures published by the financial control authority are relative. For example, the Swiss SP received by far the most membership fees, but this is mainly because left-wing politics is more centralized than bourgeois politics: the money goes to the national party apparatus. If, however, a party collects its membership fees through cantonal or municipal sections rather than national ones, the fees are missing from the tables. This is just one distortion among many.
Furthermore, only income is recorded – no one knows how large the parties’ assets are and how much they actually spend each year. On Friday morning, the first online portals headlined that the SP was the richest party in Switzerland. But no one knows whether that is true: the transparency reports do not disclose assets, only the income from a single year.
In addition, there are several areas that overlap: the financing of parties, election campaigns and voting campaigns. Individual donations sometimes appear in several reports at the same time – it is actually impossible to differentiate them from one another. This week, in addition to the figures, the Financial Control Authority sent out a “simplified presentation” with yellow and blue tables, additional notes and “explanations for understanding”. In a media interview, the Financial Control Authority also explained that the law requires that figures be published even if they are known to be incorrect. The report can be interpreted as saying that it would prefer to give up its control function.
As a journalist, the basic rule is: the more information, the better – but the problem with these transparency rules is that they will never provide the full picture. Of course, there are already calls for even more detailed regulations. But that would never end: Why should only national parties disclose their finances? Why not cantonal parties? Why not NGOs, associations, foundations too? And what if politics were then financed through clubs – wouldn’t we then have to . . .? It would be a slippery slope to complete surveillance.
Especially since even the figures that are supposedly easy to understand only provide apparent transparency. The rules stipulate that the respective political camps must disclose how much money they spend on referendum campaigns. But what if a party organizes a demonstration for better pensions during the ongoing referendum campaign on the BVG reform – purely by chance, of course? Who can prove that this is a referendum campaign and not permanent party work?
In direct democracy, all actors are constantly monitored: by political rivals, by the media, by the electorate. The new transparency bureaucracy, which costs a lot of money and means a lot of effort for the parties, is not helping: Parliament has built a smokescreen.
