Political parties receive 75 million euros per year. But there is more: with the wages of the parliamentary assistants, the actual subsidy amounts to 160 million euros. That writes ‘Knack’.
Politologists Bart Maddens, Gunther Vanden Eynde and Jef Smulders state in the weekly that the way we talk about party financing in Belgium is in urgent need of revision. They do this in response to new research for KU Leuven research center Vives.
The trio studied the eight parliaments in our country to find out how many employees the parties can count on through those institutions. There are two types of assistants: each MP is entitled to one personal assistant (in the Walloon Parliament even two) and the parliamentary group as a whole is also entitled to staff.
160 million in tax money
It doesn’t happen (yet) to every party, but the trend is clear: the employees on the payroll of the parliament are increasingly used for work for the party itself. In this way, the parties save on wage costs. And that is why the researchers suggest that we should factor those costs into the total party funding.
According to the academics, we underestimated the annual subsidy of more than 75 million euros. “If we also take wage costs into account, government funding roughly doubles,” they say. According to the new calculations, this involves more than 1,000 workers, together accounting for no less than 84.4 million euros extra. In other words, our political parties receive a total of 160 million euros in taxpayers’ money every year.
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