Reform's Ligi says SDE lied about campaign budget

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Estonian finance minister and senior Reform Party policymaker Jürgen Ligi has accused the Estonian media of using double standards and turning a blind eye when a discrepancy is revealed between the declared campaign costs and the size of the pre-election campaign of left-wing parties, and said that the general election campaign budget disclosed by the Social Democrats was clearly a lie.

Ligi said that while it was primarily the Reform Party that fell under criticism in connection with financing, there was reason to be critical also of the other parties, which were enjoying a rise in approval ratings as Reform was struggling to fend off accusations. "The name of my party sounds the most frequently, and the result of the scandal is that parties have changed places – the parties with the darkest financing are leading: these are the Center Party, of whom everybody knows it, and also the Socialists, whose budget for the Riigikogu elections was clearly a lie," Ligi told the daily Postimees in an interview.

The finance minister described the left-wing opposition parties as Teflon parties because nothing sticks to them. "The obvious example is Socialists, whose campaign was much more expensive than they declared, but nothing happened. That's the real issue, not that earlier the rules and customs were different," Ligi said, referring the the media's recent scrutiny of the funding of the Reform Party via a specially set up consultancy firm at the end of the 1990s.

Ligi said his opinion was based on an analysis conducted of the SDE pre-election campaign. "We have our analysis. It could be seen with [naked] eye too," the minister added.

Ligi suggested that also in the case of the other opposition party, Center, people and the media forgot the bad things soon and directed their criticism at right-wing parties.

"Everybody knows that people are put in jail in Tallinn all the time, literally, because they are caught at bribe-taking. They blatantly buy votes there. There's discrimination and corruption throughout. That is forgiven, and those are smeared whose culture of governance is contrastingly different. Under any circumstances, the culture of governance of the state is totally different," Ligi said, speaking of the municipality of Tallinn governed by Center and the national government made up of the coalition of Reform and Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (IRL).

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