Estonia's parties are about five months from an election and still cannot say how to run a legal political ad. ERR News reports that each ad must now say who ordered it, who paid, and with what money. The parties back the goal of transparent funding. They say the practice is hard to follow.
The case for the rules
The strongest argument for Regulation (EU) 2024/900 is that political advertising is a poor fit for a patchwork of national rules. Ads cross borders, microtargeting is hard to see from outside, and voters cannot weigh a message without knowing who is behind it. The Commission's overview says the regulation entered into full application on 10 October 2025. It requires clear labels showing who paid, the cost, and, where targeting is used, the audience targeted. It covers offline and online ads. A consistent EU standard and a public repository for online ads are real gains for accountability, and we support that goal.
What Estonia shows
The Estonian experience shows the gap between a clear principle and a workable rule. Merike Koppel, deputy director-general of the Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority, told ERR the rules cannot be explained in one sentence. She said a politician who hands out pens, flyers or merchandise in public space without using a service provider is doing internal activity that needs no marking. She also said the authority does not plan to punish anyone.
The parties are not reassured. Isamaa's communications manager Viljar Voog told ERR that when rules are unclear, parties and ad sellers choose the strictest reading to avoid large later fines. Parempoolsed had to replace its outdoor posters once after an order from the authority. Reform's secretary-general Kristo Enn Vaga said it is unclear whether a TV ad with party members, promises and party colours needs a disclaimer both spoken and shown on screen. Other open questions include whether a singer who is also a politician must announce that at concerts, and how opinion pieces are handled.
This is the problem. A regulator's promise of leniency does not bind the next regulator, a competitor's complaint, or a court. Parties and sellers set their behaviour by the worst case, not by the stated intention. The result is over-compliance: longer disclaimers, fewer ads, and less campaign speech.
The pattern is wider than Estonia
The same dynamic has played out at platform scale. Google restricted EU political advertising to official communications from EU institutions and member states. It announced the policy on 5 August 2025. It cited operational challenges and legal uncertainty, and noted that key technical guidance might not be final until just months before the rules applied. Declared campaigns stopped serving in the EU on 22 September 2025. When large intermediaries decide the compliance risk is not worth carrying, the cost falls on candidates, especially smaller or newer parties that rely on affordable online reach.
The Commission did respond. Its overview says it issued guidelines in October 2025 for sponsors, service providers, publishers and national authorities. They focus on identifying political advertising under Article 8(2) and on transparency and due diligence duties. It adopted an Implementing Act on label formats on 9 July 2025, and another on the repository's data structure on 9 April 2026. Those documents exist, yet Estonian parties still cannot answer basic questions about a radio spot or a poster. Non-binding guidelines published on the day the rules applied could not settle the edge cases, and national authorities have supplied no authoritative answers since.
A proportionate path
We do not argue for repeal. Funding transparency in elections is worth having, and the regulation's core idea is sound. The aim should be to make the rules usable before the first fine arrives.
- Publish worked examples. National authorities should issue concrete, binding-in-practice guidance for the cases parties actually ask about: radio and TV disclaimers, outdoor posters, merchandise, opinion pieces and politicians appearing in non-political settings.
- Make leniency enforceable. If the authority does not plan to punish good-faith mistakes, it should say so formally, for example through a pre-election grace period or a rule that a first violation brings a correction order before any fine.
- Offer pre-clearance. A fast, free opinion service for parties and ad sellers would replace guesswork with certainty, and cost far less than the over-compliance now occurring.
- Track the chilling effect. The Commission should measure whether the rules reduce campaign advertising, especially on the platforms that have withdrawn, and report that alongside the benefits in transparency.
The Estonian case is early evidence, not a verdict. But the pattern is familiar from other EU digital rules: the text is ambitious, the guidance is thin, and enforcement discretion is offered as a substitute for legal clarity. Discretion is not clarity. Regulators who want compliance rather than avoidance should answer the questions before the campaign starts, not after the first poster is ordered down.
Five months is enough time to fix this. It is not enough time to waste.