Montenegrin Bourgeois Revolution

Written by Đorđe Šćepović

When the clerical counter-revolution hit Montenegro in August 2020, few could have predicted that five years later, the country would be sinking into quicksand, barely keeping its head above the surface. Who would have imagined that the church-backed alternative, which took over the government, would bring Montenegro to the brink of collapse? To the heart of darkness? And yet, someone could have. Anyone not blinded by pathological hatred for one party and its leader. Anyone who didn’t, for personal gain, lie that even a regime of clerical fascism and medieval darkness was somehow preferable to the one that fell in 2020.

Let’s be clear: not many mourned the fall of a regime steeped in corruption and dysfunction. But what came after was a system built on chauvinism, cronyism, corruption, and every form of political decay imaginable. Those who claimed wisdom and righteousness sold us snake oil, insisting anything was better than what we had. Was it?

When you hear, for instance, the Democrats constantly harping on about the “DPS legacy,” using it as a smokescreen for their failures, you start to wonder if they might not be entirely wrong. Yes, “Democrats” and “truth” rarely belong in the same sentence, but in this case, semantics allows for a strange exception where the two coexist, not in the way they'd have you believe, of course.

That overused phrase, “DPS legacy,” can only refer to the very things the August revolutionaries railed against day and night, with mouths full of justice, only to later perfect them and raise the bar so high that not even DPS, at its worst and most savage, could keep up.

Mass party hirings, revenge politics, nepotism, criminality, betrayal, and the selling out of Montenegro, that’s the legacy people will speak of once this current regime is gone. So, no matter how hard we try to see beauty in the landscape, we must admit: the landscape is ugly, and our eyes aren’t to blame.

How else can one explain the madness of recent years? How do you explain the firing of more than 240 public directors in a single day? Minister Vesna Bratić axed over 240 people on the guillotine of pure hatred. If I’m not mistaken, this purge of anyone who stood out has already cost the state €400,000. And the bill will only rise. But that’s how it goes with heads and guillotines.

Everything that has happened, and continues to happen, could well be called the Montenegrin bourgeois revolution. A farcical version of the French one, perhaps, but a revolution nonetheless in form and method, echoing 1789. We didn’t have a Robespierre, but we did have Dritan Abazović and his party shock troops. Party politics and political appointments aren’t new; we’ve been watching that play since the early ’90s. But the sheer arrogance and ruthlessness reached their renaissance in 2020. With one crucial difference from the previous regime: ethnic discrimination is now in full swing. DPS and its allies leaned more toward party-based discrimination. And the best proof? All the political chameleons who jumped from the DPS camp straight into the warm bed of the new government, waking up in the arms of a different master.

Once, they were Serbs with one party card; now, still Serbs, but with a different badge. And truly, when you read about the latest round of purges in Montenegrin institutions, you can’t help but feel that Maximilien Robespierre walks among us. Those who once swung the axe at others now sob over their fate. Museum directors, gallery curators, school principals, trophies of the revolution, now lament “revenge by those who want to rule through laziness and disorder.” Really? Does a head grow wiser once it’s under the blade?

The same heads, mind you, that chopped off others before, using the very same knife. The same heads who landed cushy director posts through party favoritism. Because yes, it was always about spoils. Fairy tales about democracy and freedom? No one’s buying them anymore, not even the voters who brought these people to power. That’s why the tears of prodigal sons and daughters leave no hearts stirred.

And what are we to make of Abazović’s recent declaration: “We will not allow ourselves to become a people without a country. We will defend every inch of Montenegro”? What do you even say when a man who sold off every inch of that land now wants to defend it? From whom? His allies in the dismantling of Montenegro? And will he defend it alongside the tabloid owner, the one who founded that tabloid with DPS money, then used it to promote the so-called processions, who now flies around in private jets with the same regime tycoons he once vowed to fight to the bitter end?

All the while cozying up to Deripaska, the same Deripaska who, according to that very tabloid, used to be the bogeyman on the front page, the face of evil itself. Will that same tabloid now dare to ask: “Who’s flying at the taxpayers’ expense?” Or will we keep spinning in this farce for years, waiting for an answer that never comes?

If these phony, rotten-to-the-core, cartoonish characters manage to fool the Montenegrin people again, then the blame won’t be on them. Then maybe, just maybe, we got exactly what we deserved.