The director of the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, Ms. Jelena Perović, spoke at the Regional Perspectives panel about election campaigns on the Internet: Challenges and chances for electoral integrity, part of the Support to electoral reforms in the Western Balkans project, which is implemented by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

The agency has built a partnership relationship with the civil sector, from which it receives support in the process of controlling the financing of political subjects, Director Perović emphasized. With a proactive and systematic approach, this institution ensured full transparency and made available all data on the use of public resources and campaign financing, which was also recognized by the citizens. This is confirmed by the results of the public opinion survey, which was conducted at the end of last year. In the survey, 77.4% of respondents stated that the Agency contributed to strengthening the transparency of the use of resources and financing of political entities.

Introducing the panel participants with the legislation and methodology of the Agency's work in the control and supervision of the election campaign, developed with the support of the European Union and the Council of Europe, Director Perović announced that political entities spent 11,057,000 euros in election campaigns in the period from 2016 to 2020. Out of that amount, 880,755 euros is spent on advertising on social media and portals, which is constantly growing.

The challenges we face in this area are not something that makes us special, but we share them with neighboring countries, as well as the members of the European Union themselves, and they are caused by the development of digital technologies. First of all, they refer to the difficult possibilities of proper control and confirmation of the value of advertising on social networks reported by political entities. The regulatory solutions that are in force are insufficient and cannot be applied to Facebook/Meta, Google and other service providers whose headquarters are not in Montenegro. In addition, the Law on the Financing of Political Entities and Election Campaigns does not recognize the conduct of campaigns by third parties, especially visible on social networks.

Through the application of the Law in the election campaigns in 2020 and 2021, the Agency established several shortcomings and ambiguities in the legislative framework and defined a number of recommendations for its future improvement. For this purpose, it shared its views to European partners and the NGO sector, and continued to provide support to competent parliamentary working groups.

Speaking about the current election campaign, Director Perović reminded that it will last unusually long, more than five months, which requires significant effort and the engagement of additional resources of the Agency. Despite this, this institution is ready to respond to challenges and provide a full contribution to the integrity of the electoral process.