Romanian political parties face scrutiny over media spending discrepancies

A report by Expert Forum reveals significant discrepancies in how Romanian political parties spend funds on press and propaganda. In the first seven months of 2026, parties declared spending 26.4 million lei for these purposes out of nearly 100 million lei in total subsidies. However, monitoring of transparency notifications under European political advertising regulations identified only 15.2 million lei in contracts across 52 notifications.

The discrepancy between declared spending and identified contracts exceeds 11 million lei. The identified advertising contracts are highly concentrated, with three companies capturing nearly 80% of the value. Among the political parties, PSD reported the highest spending at 13.1 million lei, followed by PNL at 5.8 million lei and AUR at 4.6 million lei. USR and POT each reported 1.4 million lei, while SOS România declared approximately 205,000 lei.

Expert Forum noted that because the monitoring process is largely manual, the identified data may not fully reflect the actual total value of funds spent on political advertising.