Let's see what it is for: media advertising, street posters, mufflers, caps, lighters. If you want an adviser, that is a counselor, you have to pay. And there is also a party membership charge. Your electoral adventure as representative of a party starts begins only after you fueled the party's budget with a significant amount. If you are not exactly popular or if the party has distributed you to a less friendly board of candidates, populated with mayors of a different political orientation, one hundred Euro isn't enough. Regardless of the advice your counselor has extracted from his political marketing books, you know that he key to success in elections in Romania is sure to consist as well in some bags of flour, shoes and meat. Mobile phones are optional, for the whimsical ones only. Since there is no such thing as political volunteering, you have to save up some for the procession following you and crying out your name. As for the bargaining with the music players, this is easy to do, for the campaign is due during the Christmas fast, when weddings are not allowed to Christians. So there are more and more costs. What is 100, 000 Euro? It is much or little? It depends on what and whom you mean. The wife of Adrian Videanu, the ex general mayor of Bucharest, paid 100, 000 for a dress. For people like them, this is nothing. To the ordinary candidate, a teacher or an engineer, let's say, the expenses on the presumptive deputyship are easy to feel. We don't reckon that ordinary candidates, with no considerable wealth admitted in the statements on personal properties, won't play the election lottery using funds they should have spent on their children. And such candidates won't be few. They have got money available for the campaign due to donations made by people or companies pursuing certain interests of economic nature and waiting for something in exchange. So a candidate is indebted when reaching the Parliament. And his 1, 200 Euro a month is not enough to pay the debt. He would need two mandates to save up 100, 000 Euro from his wages as a MP. So there must be some other way to get even with the donors. A beer law, let's say, that erases the debts of some companies and settles norms on various facilities, allowing some to buy at a low cost and sell at a high price, due to certain relations with people in certain palaces and cabinets. All of a sudden, the elector finds that the representative he trusted and voted for is an agent of traffic of influence instead of making laws to serve citizens. What is the elector to do? Most lawmakers and some NGOs watching the expenses typical of electoral campaigns and the integrity of the elected claim that Romania's normative frame in this field is a good one. They opine that the greatest problem is the fact that institutions don't apply the law, which is partly true. The National Integrity Agency has completed no case on a MP owning an unjustified fortune. The Police and the Prosecutor's Office have not finished investigations on the electoral bribery in the village of Stefanesti. They did not even care about the mobile phones given as gifts during the local elections or candidates filmed while paying people around. And it is not only the fact that the law is disallowed, but also that it gets changed. Except for Transparency International, no one has minded that last spring the government modified the norms on the making of political parties by simplifying the procedures by which citizens and companies make donations to political groups. Authorities did away with that norm according to which the donors were to say if they had debts to state institutions and admit that their donation was not meant to coordinate the political beneficiary' activity. So from now on the deputies, beneficiaries of funds during campaign, will have no problem voting for facilities to serve the generous company, for thy could not have known that the honest donor was indebted to some state institutions. Or could they?

Ovidiu BANCHES