Creative accounting on the campaign trail

According to a report prepared by the Batory Foundation and the Institute of Public Affairs, both candidates for presidency should have stopped spending money on campaigning in the presidential race long ago.

The campaign budgets are limited by law to zł.13.8 million for each candidate, and according to estimates from the NGOs, Civic Platform's (PO) presidential candidate Donald Tusk had already exceeded that limit by mid-September. At the same time Law and Justice's (PiS) candidate Lech Kaczyński was close to exhausting his campaign budget, having spent zł.13.39 million.

That should have meant that Tusk had no funds with which to campaign, both in the last weeks preceding the first round of presidential elections as well as in the second phase of the showdown, while Kaczyński had less than zł.500,000 to spend.

However, the fact that the parliamentary and presidential elections followed each other, and the fact that the financing regulations are different for both campaigns, mean campaign bookkeeping has become an exercise in 'fuzzy math'.

Some of the ways to avoid expenses were promoting candidates before the official start of the campaign, promoting presidential candidates with money for the parliamentary campaign (recommending candidates for parliament on billboards was a frequent sin), having candidates promote books or music concerts, as well as using public offices and office cars for campaign duties.

Most of this money is likely to be included in the parliamentary elections, as parties that made it to parliament receive refunds from the state budget.