Local Elections 2024: Parties Spent Over 10.8 million BAM on Four Segments of the Campaign

According to estimates by Transparency International in Bosnia and Herzegovina (TI BiH), the election campaign for the 2024 local elections has already cost at least 10.8 million BAM. This figure covers four campaign segments: billboard advertisements, media ads, Meta platform advertisements (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), and expenses for campaign rallies. The party with the highest spending is SNSD, with 1.6 million BAM, followed by SDA (1.1 million BAM), SDP BiH (1 million BAM), PDP (713,000 BAM), and HDZ (643,000 BAM).

These amounts are not final as they exclude advertising and rally expenses incurred in the final days of the campaign, as well as other forms of advertising that are difficult to estimate due to unavailable data, such as Google Ads. Nonetheless, the data suggests that this is one of the most expensive election campaigns for local elections in BiH, with political parties reporting higher expenditures than ever before, as per the Central Election Commission (CEC).

About 6.2 million BAM was spent on external advertising

As in previous years, advertising on billboards was by far the most expensive form of campaign, and TI BiH observers recorded about 3,800 advertisements on billboards, the market value of which is about 6.2 million BAM.

TI BiH published on the online map all locations of billboards where party advertising was recorded, and the largest number was placed by SDA (520), whose market value is over 800 thousand BAM.

Besides SDA, SNSD, SDP, HDZ, Demokratski Front and NIP spent the most money on this form of advertising. It should be noted that the costs of external advertising are calculated on the basis of publicly available commercial advertising prices, although some advertisers point out that political marketing is paid an additional 20%.

Advertising in the Media

In the first three weeks of the election campaign, political parties spent about 1.6 million BAM on advertising in the media, according to media monitoring agency hired by TI BIH. During the monitoring period, 2400 advertising announcements were recorded, for which 1.6 million BAM were spent (advertising and production). It should be emphasized that this total does not include posts that were not marked as paid advertising. Most often, these were TV shows and interviews in print media, and the value of such announcements is estimated at 1.3 million BAM.

The data was collected through media content monitoring conducted by the media monitoring agency for the needs of TI BIH and includes advertising costs on 10 leading TV stations in BiH and 28 daily and weekly newspapers.

More money in this part of the campaign, as in the previous year, was spent by parties based in the Republic of Srpska, and according to the data so far, not including the last week of the campaign, SNSD, SDS, Narodni front, Ujedinjena Srpska and PDP spent the most. It should be emphasized that the monitoring did not include a large number of local and cantonal TV stations in Federation of BiH. The amounts are estimated according to official media price lists and commercial prices, and include the costs of making pre-election videos and materials.

Meta ads cost over 250,000 BAM

Official data from the company Meta show that 6,489 political ads have been paid for in BiH so far, the value of which is about 254 thousand BAM. This includes the ads on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and the costs are at the level of last year, and do not include the last week of the campaign.

Naša stranka has spent the most on this type of advertising so far, as 944 advertisements were published on the accounts of this party and its candidates, the value of which, according to Meta’s estimate, is about 39 thousand BAM. This is followed by SDP (34,000 BAM) and SDA (26,000 BAM), followed by PDP, SPS and SNSD.

This amount should increase further because Meta data is not updated in real time and includes spending that was published until Monday, and these costs only apply to ads that the platform has marked as political in content.

It should be noted that the costs of online advertising are still impossible to adequately estimate because data on Google ads, referring to advertising on web portals and the YouTube platform, are not available for the BiH market. TI BiH reminds that the parties should report the exact amount of expenses for all forms of online advertising in the reports that they were required to submit to the CEC in the online advertising column.

Election Rallies

Significant expenses of the election campaign, as in previous years, were incurred at election rallies, and TI BiH observers recorded 757 election rallies since the beginning of the campaign. According to the estimate of TI BiH, based on the size of the gatherings and accompanying contents, they have cost around 2.6 million BAM so far, and that price was mostly influenced by the costs of venues, foods, drinks, music, equipment rental, sound and lighting systems, and other contents used at the gatherings.

This amount is expected to be further increased in the last week of the campaign when most parties organize central rallies. It should be noted that this figure is probably higher because TI BiH did not have the capacity to include a large number of smaller gatherings of political parties in local settlements.

As in previous years, SNSD spends by far the most money on this form of campaign, and the value of over 130 recorded rallies of this party is about 790,000 BAM, and a large number of them include renting tents, restaurants, food, drinks and other facilities that affect the estimated value. After the SNSD, SDA, PDP, HDZ and SDP had the highest costs of election rallies.

When everything is added up, political parties have so far spent about 10.9 million BAM on three forms of paid advertising and election rallies. Political parties for local elections have never reported more than 7 million BAM expenses, while the highest reported campaign amount was for the last General Election and was 11.3 million BAM.

TI BIH then warned that eight parties concealed at least 1.5 million BAM because the total reported expenses of those parties were far lower than those recorded by TI BiH for only four segments of the campaign.

In addition, it should be noted that the problem of controlling the financing of political parties has existed in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a long time and that the parties do not have legal sources of financing with which they can justify such high campaign costs. Most parties do not report donations from large companies that do business with the state and receive public money because this is prohibited by the Law on Financing Political Parties.