Candidates’ election campaign expenses revealed
Switzerland's main national parties have budgets in the millions for the federal elections on October 22, and individual candidates are budgeting tens of thousands of francs. For the first time, parties, organisations and candidates must publicly disclose large campaign budgets.
The deadline for reporting budgets of CHF50,000 ($56,000) or more and large donations of CHF15,000 or more to the Swiss Federal Audit Office (SFAO) ended on Thursday. Figures will now be published on an ongoing basis for another two weeks.
+ Campaign funding still a taboo topic in Switzerland
The figures for four national parties are already known. The Centre said it is budgeting CHF2.1 million, and the Social Democrats CHF1.7 million. The Greens expect to spend CHF1.3 million, and the Protestant Party has CHF275,000 in reserve.
Figures from two national associations are also available: Gastrosuisse wants to support 160 mostly centrist candidates with CHF315,000. The Swiss Bankers Association wants to support the Radical-Liberals, the Swiss People’s Party, the Centre and the Liberal Greens with CHF51,000.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.