QCOSTARICA – Six national parties and two at the provincial level will be able to access resources from the political debt (deuda política) for their political campaigns in the elections on February 6.
In total, the state (taxpayers) will hand over ¢19,8 billion colones to the eight political parties for their participation in the 2022 general elections.
They are: the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), Partido Progreso Social Democrático (PPSD), Partido Nueva República (PNR), Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC), Partido Liberal Progresista (PLP), and the Frente Amplio (FA) at the national level; and Unión Guanacasteca, from Guanacaste, and Recuperando Valores, from Limón.
All eight parties have the right to public resources, despite the fact that they failed to win seats in Congress, they did obtain a vote of over 4% in the legislative elections of their provinces.
The constitutional norm establishes that those parties that obtain a vote greater than 4% of the votes for presidents and legislators, or that obtain a seat in the legislature, will be able to access political debt resources. In the case of the provincial parties, to reach that percentage, only the votes for legislators are counted.
According to Rónald Chacón, head of the Political Party Financing Department of the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (TSE) – electoral tribunal, these resources are distributed proportionally according to the electoral flow.
However, the final amount to be delivered to each group will be defined once the TSE reviews the expense settlements of those groups, since it may happen that the TSE does not accept some of the expenses recorded by the parties.
“The TSE recognizes to each party the amount of expenses that it actually considers proven, for example, a party may be entitled to a significant amount of resources, but if the liquidation it presents is not suitable, there may be a tendency to the decrease with respect to the amount that is actually recognized,” said Chacón.
To determine the maximum amounts to which each party can access, it is necessary for the Tribunal to determine the individual cost of the vote, which is the result of dividing the total amount of the state contribution by the sum of the valid votes obtained by all the parties. entitled to contribution. Each party will receive a maximum of the amount resulting from multiplying the individual cost of the vote by the number of valid votes obtained.
With these resources, the parties can pay the commitments made to cover campaign expenses. In addition, the buyers of bonds of the political parties will be able to claim their money from the State, as long as the party obtains sufficient resources to cover all certificate issues.
Class A bonds will have payment priority; if there is enough money, class B issues will be paid, and so on. If the money does not cover all the issues of the parties, those bonds will be worthless and their buyer will not be able to recover their investment.
