Dozens of ongoing public tenders, which are intended to employ hundreds of officials during the election campaign or immediately after it, testify to a new round of party recruitment, i.e. pre-election bribery of political supporters with "state work", announced the deputy executive director of the Center for Democratic transition (CDT) Biljana Papović.
The majority formed after the parliamentary elections in 2020, she believes, did not fulfill the promise made to the citizens about the introduction of a fair and knowledge-based employment system, but "further refined and raised the pernicious logic of 'one employee, four votes' to a higher level".
"And instead of introducing new instruments on the stage that mean winning a greater degree of democracy in electoral processes, instead of using political power for the progress of society, it remains a mechanism of bizarre logic of turning citizens into voting machines and reducing their political freedoms," said Papović. .
In parallel with the obstruction of the electoral reform, as she said, an additional blow to democratic principles was dealt by "the collapse of the public administration reform", a significant part of which is the reform of the employment system in the state administration and state-owned enterprises.
"With the entry into force of the new Law on the Financing of Political Entities in early 2020, state-owned enterprises were exempted from the ban on employment in the election campaign. This opened up space for companies to become new depots of party personnel without any restrictions or controls. With the change of government, this provision of the law remained is unchanged, while companies suffered a new wave of politicization," Papović points out.
After this intervention, he adds, it was possible to start filling state companies with "party bribes" both during election campaigns and outside of them.
"When we talk about those bodies and institutions for which the employment ban still applies, the available recruitment control mechanisms during the campaign, implemented by the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, have not produced results for years, so the malignant phenomenon of rewarding party activists with 'state jobs' in the public became completely acceptable," said Papović.
He emphasizes that the fact that the Government, that is, the Ministry of Finance "withholds data" on the number of employees in the state for months, proves that there is an intention to cover up these phenomena.
"The fact that we as members of the Public Administration Reform Council requested this data and insisted that it be transparent did not help us either. The Ministry of Finance did not make it available even though it was obliged to do so by the conclusion of the Public Administration Reform Council from November 2022. This is only another in a series of examples that many government bodies exist only on paper and that politicians can do whatever they want to achieve their partial political interests, which can have unfathomable long-term consequences for the development of democratic processes and society in general," concludes Papović.
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