But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.

> giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money

How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.

In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.

e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?

By allowing uncapped funding, you’re just giving a lot of power to big money. Which is not exactly democratical either.

I guess having parties funded entirely by small private donations or maybe a way to optionally allocate some share of the taxes you pay yourself and banning all direct funding from government and corporations could be the least bad option.

That’s what is going on here

- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations

- parties can take capped membership fees

- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously

- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.

Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.