Socialists and Liberals. The PS and the Liberal Initiative were champions in the 2022 legislation regarding slippages between what they expected to spend in this election campaign and what they actually spend.
In an absolute sense, the PS crushes all other parties: its election campaign cost almost a million euros more than the party had initially budgeted. It went from 2.45 million euros (expected costs) to 3.38 million euros (final costs). A deviation of 38.2 percentage points from the initial forecast.
But if the socialists are champions of derailment in absolute values, the Liberal Initiative already beats all other parliamentary parties in terms of percentage deviation. The Liberals spent 55% more than they originally expected. A campaign budgeted at 385,000 euros ultimately cost almost 600,000 euros.
In this championship of derailments between forecasts and final costs, PSD and CDU stand out. In these two formations, the opposite of what was seen in all the others happened: the final expenditures were lower than the costs initially envisaged. For the PSD, the difference is 4.1% (almost 85 thousand euros); the percentage is higher in the coalition led by the communists: they spent 20.6% less than initially budgeted. A campaign predicted to cost €695,000 ended up costing €552,000. Savings: 143 thousand euros.
The figures regarding the expenditure and income of the parties in the last parliamentary elections can be found on the website of the Entity of Political Accounts and Financing (ECFP). And they make it possible, for example, to evaluate the profitability of the campaigns. That is, how much it cost each party to get a vote; and how much it costs each side to elect a deputy.
Thus, since the PS campaign was by far the most expensive (3.4 million euros), it was also – given the result achieved by the party (absolute majority, with 2.3 million votes to elect 120 deputies) – all the more rentable . Each deputy cost the PS about 19,000 euros. It was the lowest cost per elected candidate in the campaign – 13 times less than the most expensive cost, that of the election of the only PAN deputy, Inês Sousa Real, which cost more than a quarter of a million euros (252 thousand).
Smaller, more expensive
What this accounting shows is that the average cost of electing a deputy rises as the parties get smaller and smaller in the number of deputies elected. In other words: the cheapest electoral representative is the PS, then the PSD, then the Chega – according to this evolution, the order of magnitude of the parties in parliament. But there is an exception.
That exception is Livre. As in 2019, the party elected one deputy. After Joacine Katar-Moreira, now Rui Tavares. ECFP figures show that the Livre campaign was incomparably cheaper than any other. It cost less than 60 thousand euros.
This means that Livre could choose one deputy who spent four times less than the PAN, which also only chose the party leader, Inês Sousa Real, for a total amount of 252 thousand euros. Apparently, the difference stems from the fact that Livre focused all its campaign efforts around Rui Tavares, while the PAN distributed it to candidates in different circles (at least, in addition to Lisbon, Porto and Setúbal, where in 2019 it had managed to get elected deputies , four in total).
Livre thus also managed to be the party that spent the least per vote received (and in total there were more than 71 thousand votes): 0.83 euros. Then followed in this ratio (money spent divided by the total number of votes) the PSD (1.22 euros per vote) and then the PS. Again, from then on, the values follow inversely the order of the parties: the smaller they are, the more expensive each vote is. The PAN was again the least profitable party in this chapter: each of its 88,127 votes cost the party 2.85 euros.
Spend less than in 2019
The campaign reports now available on the ECFP website show that, from a point of view of the actual expenditure of the parties that won the parliamentary elections, the overall costs were slightly lower than those of the 2019 legislative campaigns. about eight million euros; while in 2019 they had spent almost 8.2 million euros.
The total amount of government grants to parties rose from six to seven million between the two elections – in part due to the fact that neither Chega nor IL claimed their credit in 2019, having done so in 2022.
The PS bore the most expenditure in absolute terms: in 2019 total expenditure amounted to 2.9 million euros and in 2022 it rose to 3.4 million. The PSD – led at the time by Rui Rio, who boasted about cost containment – remained at a similar level: 1.8 million in 2019 and 1.9 in 2022. The number of elected deputies also hardly changed, for the Social Democrats: 77 in the latter elections and 79 in the previous one.
BE and CDU cut…
The worldwide decrease in campaign costs in the penultimate legislatures is therefore largely due to the containment efforts of the Bloco de Esquerda and the CDU.
In 2019, Catarina Martins’ party had a total expenditure of 1.3 million euros (gaining half a million votes, electing 19 deputies). Conscious that the 2022 parliamentary elections would already be lost given the circumstances that caused them – fracture in the apparatus, failure of the OE2022, government resignation and president’s call for an early election – the blockers have cut spending by more reduced by half: 590 thousand euros.
…Enough and IL increase
It was the same with the communists – for the same reasons. The total campaign expenditure of the CDU in 2019 was one million euros (which “earned” the party with 332,400 votes, converted into 12 elected deputies); already in 2022, expenditures fell to about half (551 thousand euros) – and so did the number of elected deputies (six).
The exact opposite happened with Chega and the Liberal Initiative (IL). Both one and the other entered the 2022 campaign expecting them to grow significantly in votes and in alternates elected (in 2019, they had each won one alternate).
For example, Ventura and (at the time) Cotrim Figueiredo, leaders of Chega and IL respectively, pressed the accelerator of spending.
According to information available on the ECFP, the Chega campaign cost €150,000 in 2019. Now, in the 2022 legislatures, that amount has more than quadrupled to 615,400 euros. The party went from one deputy to 12. From 67,800 votes, it grew to almost 400,000.
The same happened in the Liberal Initiative – albeit here with a huge difference between the budgeted costs and the final expenditure. In 2019, the party spent 65.6 thousand euros, and in 2022 almost 600 thousand – the expenses increased almost tenfold. The party went from one elected deputy to eight. The 67,681 votes from the penultimate legislature increased to 273,400 votes in the final.
Bills presented, it is now up to the EFCP to approve any sanctions for non-compliance.
Source: DN
