How much money have political powers and candidates spent on the elections? People are really curious to know this but as this is not official information to be revealed, we will try to help our logic to understand it.
The campaign started on April 8. According to the CEC’s official information, the expenses political power made during April 8-26 were the following: PA – 53.5 million drams, Heritage – 66.2 million, ANC – 10.5 million, ARF – 40.3 million, ADP – 305,000, ACP – 1.3 million, RPA – 77.7 and LS – 31.8 million. This means that ten days before the election day these nine political powers had spent 282 million drams on the campaign. This concerns the proportional system only, and the final information will be published on May 12 only. We cannot say anything about the majoritarian system of elections yet. According to the Electoral Code, in case of proportional system of elections the maximum expenses can be 100 million drams. And in case of the majoritarian system – 10 million drams. Nine political powers have participated under the proportional system, and 137 candidates under the majoritarian system. According to the law, the pre-election campaign expenses cannot exceed 2,270 billion (900 million for proportional, and 1,370 million for majoritarian system of elections).
This money (2,270 million drams) is equal to 5.8 million dollars. Parties could even show more money, but by law it is not allowed to spend more. In some cities some of the powers have even spent much less than the allowed limit of spending. In case of majoritarian system of election it is hard to believe that anyone would spend much money in competition with a candidate nominated by the ruling RPA party, knowing that he/she will lose that money. Thus, we can assume that the spending limits announced officially will not exceed 1 billion drams, including 350-400 million for the proportional.
Does this money show the real picture and amounts of spending? Can we believe that all parties, including the pro-government parties together have spent 400 million drams on the elections? If we assume that the minimum amount of electoral bribe is 5000 and only 10% out of 1,5 million voters participating in election have taken bribe, it will mean that only on this they spent 750 million drams. Now we will try to analyze the information published by the official statistics to understand the situation better.
For that purpose we will need only one source. According to the information of the Central Bank, as of May 4, 2012, the amount of cash in drams out of the CB was 361.5 billion. This means that during only one month, in April, which was the campaign period, the cash flow out of banks increased by 33 billion drams (about 84 million dollars). This means that in only one month 33 billion more cash was circulated in the economy.
For comparison, during the entire year the cash flow in the economy according to the CB had grown only by 1.7 billion. During February it even reduced by 300 million drams.
What was the reason for so much drastic increase of cash outflow? We cannot assume that all this money was spent on elections, but it is definitely connected with elections and this is proven by the statistics of the past elections as well. During April of the previous years the capacity of cash increased in the economy, but not so much (in 2008 – by 3.4 billion, and in April 2009 – by 4.9 billion).
This shows that several billion drams in cash was spent on the elections. The 33 billion of this year is a record as this is more than any amount spent during any other election in Armenia. Even if there is natural growth of cash in circulation, the amount is much for the country and definitely partly the reason is distribution of electoral bribe. It would be very interesting to know the opinions of the Central Bank president and finance minister about such increased capacity of cash in circulation.
In the end of this article we would like to ask a question to those voters who took 5 0r 10,000 drams as electoral bribe. What do you think, where will the authorities take their billions spent on elections back? Where will they take this money from during the next five years? If you think they will not take that money from you, it means you are in paradise.