Hey Big Spender

The By-Elections edition.

Money and elections don’t just go hand in hand; they’re locked in a kind of seedy embrace, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. Democracy, in theory, is a clean mechanism of the public will; in practice, it’s a marketplace where attention is bought, outrage is engineered, and candidates are polished into something palatable enough to be able to sell to the electorate. Unless you’re Fianna Fáil, of course.

But none of this happens without money. Posters, leaflets, and, quaintly enough, newspaper advertising all cost money. Online spending, which used to be a factor in electioneering budgets, is now confined to the dark reaches of the internet since META banned political advertising on its platforms in Europe.

Liz Carolan, over on The Briefing, recently posted about a little-known new EU regulation (TTPA), which requires European Union political parties to disclose information on their advertising expenditures. There’s a darkly amusing caveat here: the political parties are “self-reporting” their self-indulgence. Stop laughing down the back.