September 05, 2020

Montenegro elections: The real winners are citizens

topic:	Election
located:	Montenegro
editor:	Katarina Panić

Last Sunday’s general election in Montenegro was marked as historical after the opposition parties won a narrow majority of 41 out of 81 seats in parliament. It seems it was the most significant political event since the small Adriatic country of some 620,000 people declared independence from Serbia in 2006.

Veteran leader Milo Đukanović’s regime had fallen. His Democratic Party of Socialist (DPS), lost the power for the very first time over more than three decades. How long they ruled, a journalist from Podgorica described in a story titled Montenegro Spends a Lifetime with Đukanović in the eve of his second run for presidency office, after he served as Prime Minister six times and as President once.

According to this year’s Nations in Transit report by the watchdog organisation Freedom House, Montenegro is classified as a hybrid regime. For the first time since 2003, it is no longer in the group of democracies, mostly because of negative developments related to judicial independence, media freedoms, and corruption.

“Years of increasing state capture, abuse of power, and strongman tactics employed by […] Milo Đukanović in Montenegro have tipped the country over the edge,” the report reads.

Both winners and losers are gathering these days either to celebrate or to protest, turning to be violent. Ethnic tensions rise, religious divisions deepen in the country with some 45 per cent Montenegrin-Orthodox, some 29 per cent Serbian-Orthodox and some eight per cent Bosniaks-Muslims.

“Provocations and riots are desired in Montenegro because someone is defending stolen billions and life outside prison, so let all who wish well to this country stay in their homes these days,” Vlado Otašević, editor at Crime and corruption reporting network LUPA wrote on his Facebook.

All three opposition lists have only one thing in common – a wish to tear down the regime. Everything else is far away from shared values. However, they agreed to form a government of experts to overcome the partocracy, to stay committed to NATO membership and the EU path and to change the discriminatory laws in the country.

The turnout was unusually high – almost 77 per cent out of some 540,000 eligible voters. “The real winners of these elections are the citizens, who have been given a powerful weapon: the awareness that power can be changed. All those who care about the rule of law hope that disrespect for human rights and freedoms will be punished regularly in democratic elections,” Jovana Marović from Podgorica-based think-tank Politikon Network wrote in her opinion article for BIRN.

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