CRTA: Election Campaign Conditions Worse Than in 2020

Rasa Nedeljkov (CRTA/Zoran Drekalovic)

The CRTA observer mission assessed on March 31 that the current campaign for the April elections was taking place in worse conditions than the one for the elections of 2020. 

The program director of CRTA, Rasa Nedeljkov, said at a news conference that this was the main conclusion of their mission, stressing that the institutions in charge of enforcing and monitoring the law "had not contributed to the protection of the public interest in sufficient measure." He said that their work had not resulted in a greater accomplishment of the standards of free and democratic elections.

In his words, the institutions that did react to legal violations during the campaign had not had any influence on a change in behavior of the election participants who abused their institutional advantages. He said that CRTA had described the 2020 election process as one of the worst they observed, and that the measures for improving the election conditions that resulted from the two inter-party dialogues, "have not brought about the improvement in the key problems of the election process."

According to CRTA, these measures have resulted in a more complex legislation and institutional framework for carrying out the elections, "but have not contributed in practice to solving the burning problems of the election process." According to the observers, these are the inequality of election participants in the media, using public resources for campaign gains, the practice of clientelism and voter coercion.