The Diplomat in Spain

The minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro, in a recent public engagement.

The Diplomat. Madrid.

The Ministry of Finance, run by Cristóbal Montoro, will distribute a total of 29.3 million euros among political groups getting seats at the European elections next 25 May.

Only those parties getting a seat in the European Parliament will receive assistance. For that, the Government recently published some distribution rules in order to defray the groups’ electoral costs.

For this year, the Executive will not be updating amounts related to values such as the RPI, it will be raising them to 1% instead. The same mechanism was used for pensions (the so called desindexation), but in this case the increase was 0.25%, according to the Foundation Civio.

Parties will receive 32,508.74 euros for each seat they get and 1.08 euros for each vote (as long as they get, at least, one seat). In the last European elections of 2009, subsidies were of 32,202.22 euros for each seat and 1.07 euros for each vote. This assistance has doubled its value since 1989.

The limit for electoral expenditure is of 0.19 euros per inhabitant of the electoral district where they are presented. Besides, the rule includes a subsidy for the expenses of direct postage of electoral propaganda which also depends on the results and goes from 0.16 euros per voter in parties with more than 15% of the votes to 0.02 euros for those with more than 1% but less than 3%.

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Subsidies per seat and per vote obtained have doubled since the elections of 1989

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This entry of 29.34 million to subsidize electoral expenditure for political parties adds to the 82 million allocated to their ordinary operation and to the 2.7 million that the General Budgets of the State include to defray security expenditure.

The Autonomous Communities also subsidized parties with representation in the regional parliaments. Besides, foundations linked to these, will share out 90,000 euros of International Cooperation, an area dependent on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and 1.9 million of the Ministry of Culture.