Skopje, 27 January 2025 (MIA) - The last parliamentary elections in the country saw the establishment of a significant number of organizations with no media background with the goal of receiving state funds, electoral financing expert Sam Power said at a briefing Monday as part of the project “Money, Media and Elections in North Macedonia” organized by the Metamorphosis Foundation and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).

“The main thing we determined in relation to online news portals is that it is very likely that a significant number of organizations were founded in order to use state funds, despite the fact they had no media background and probably only used the system in Macedonia to receive and abuse state funds. When we spoke to interested parties, they said it is very likely that state funds are being abused by these political entrepreneurs. What do they do? They create a website, receive funds from the state and then have zero participation in the political system,” Power said.

Power said a report has been drafted providing numerous recommendations aiming to tighten regulations regarding the allocation of public funds during election campaigns.

“The first recommendation is in relation to the criteria for allocating funds and the need for them to be aligned with the European norms, to depend on the number of votes and to be adopted in Parliament. The second recommendation is for the methodology of allocating funds to be transparent and for a body to be established that will be tasked with the allocation of funds. The third recommendation is related to the need to provide greater room for smaller parties to present themselves to the electorate. Another part of our project is to assess the ways in which public funds are being used in the frameworks of gender and social inclusion in a more effective way. Increasingly more countries, including in the Western Balkans, make use of public funds to improve gender representation in political parties and the media,” Power said.

Power stressed that they identified hate speech during the campaign and highlighted the necessity of amendments to the Electoral Code to prevent hate speech. 

“We had a team that specifically worked on a study focused on hate speech and social inclusion and they recommended changes to the Electoral Code to ban any hate speech on online news portals receiving public funds, as well as in online advertising and campaigns,” Power said. 

According to the findings of a monitoring of online news portals, 150 of online news portals or around 60 percent, published paid political ads. A total of EUR 811.000 in public funds were spent on online advertising during the parliamentary elections.

The Monitoring of Online News Portals Coverage of 2024 Parliamentary Elections in North Macedonia, published by the Metamorphosis Foundation, noted that political parties used public subsidies designated for campaign advertising to redistribute funds to media outlets with a positive editorial stance toward their campaigns.

Photo: MIA