Vorarlberg parties must repay 63,500 euros over campaign rules

Five parties in Vorarlberg’s state parliament must repay a total of 63,500 euros for breaches of campaign spending rules during the 2024 state election, ORF’s Vorarlberg service reported. The amounts are relatively small, and the parties can still appeal the decisions.

The Greens must repay 23,500 euros and the FPÖ 21,600 euros. The remaining repayments bring the total for all five parties to 63,500 euros. All were imposed for minor breaches. By comparison, parties repaid nearly 289,800 euros over errors in their 2023 financial reports.

Repayments could have reached 10 percent of each party’s public funding. The highest proportion was imposed on the FPÖ, at 3.7 percent, followed by the Greens at 3.5 percent, the SPÖ at 1.7 percent, the ÖVP at 0.7 percent and NEOS at 0.5 percent. The amounts are repayments, not fines.

The FPÖ began placing campaign advertising on 31 July 2024, more than seven weeks before it was permitted. The Greens also advertised too early in regional media and on social media. The state party transparency senate classified both cases as serious breaches of campaign law. It treated one early SPÖ advertisement as a light breach and one ÖVP case as minor. NEOS was the only party to keep all its advertising within the legal period.

Other breaches involved accounting or filing errors. NEOS campaign costs were mistakenly assigned to its state party rather than its federal party because the campaigns for the state and national elections were running at the same time. The SPÖ did not report the cost of a pre-campaign photo shoot, although it used the images during the campaign. The ÖVP left out an advertisement by the Wirtschaftsbund, the FPÖ failed to report a bus rental, and the Greens omitted the Röthis local group and Grüne Wirtschaft.

Austria tightened its party finance transparency rules following political scandals in previous decades. Parties now submit annual financial reports at federal and state level, as well as reports on campaign spending. The Vorarlberg Court of Audit reviews the campaign reports and sends its findings to the state party transparency senate, which considers repayment decisions. The rulings over the 2024 state election came two years later.

The parties may challenge the repayment orders before the state administrative court. In recent cases involving annual financial reports, the court rejected all party appeals against repayments.