Good morning! This is another repetition of the thesis that we don’t have to adore or like politicians in order for them to do their job properly. One should build relations with them like in trade. We vote for you, while you ensure normal conditions for our life and work.
How to treat politicians?
We should not delude ourselves that everyone in Montenegro would understand that politicians shouldn’t be mystified or positioned from where they would find it hard to step down later. But we should often repeat the lessons about the meaning of power and how one should build the relationship with it. Until 2020, the 30-year rule of the DPS and its partners was the only democracy we had known about Montenegro. It was a consolidated, stable political power that made some considerable progress despite all the flaws. However, it reached its limits and couldn’t keep existing anymore. It reached its limits long before it was overthrown for the wrong reasons.
However, the strategic directions of Montenegro in foreign policy, paved with assumed obligations, as well as the political-system orientations petrified in the Constitution, make politicians who entered politics with different intentions adapt to real-politics. From ardent anti-NATO propagandists, in a very short time we got convinced transatlanticists.
Therefore, it’s more effective to impact public opinion than politicians. Experience has shown. If we convince public opinion that something important to us is of exceptional importance for the entire community, we are halfway to realizing our interest.
That is why politicians are obsessively focused on the media. Some of them thought that with social networks, that is, social media, as they say in English, they would be able to avoid intermediaries and communicate directly with the public. In some cases, this strategy gave results, but in Montenegro it often ended in failure. See the most active tiktok politicians Abazovic and Dajkovic and compare their real power with internet popularity.
It means that the traditional media still have a monopoly over the public opinion and the creation of opinions. However, the popularity of the media also depends on something, i.e. someone – the readers.
The readers are also voters.
If those voters choose politicians based on what those politicians are, and not what those politicians will be when they get into power – fat chance. Because we don’t have one public and it’s not monolithic. There are many different opinions called by one name – the public opinion.
That public opinion is the currency in political games. Therefore, we should not try to elect the right people to the right places, but make our interest politically profitable for the politicians. Profitable in the currency mentioned a little while ago.
This is how we exchange favors with politicians. Not by buying us with 50 euros for a vote, or a job that we don’t have to work. But by creating conditions for good education for our children, good road and other infrastructure, good urban planning. We will be successful in our intentions to the extent that our vision becomes politically profitable, that is, to the extent that it brings good consequences to the largest number of people. When and if we upgrade the system like that, this will be a prosperous country.
That’s all for today. Until tomorrow.
Best regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer and columnist
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily those of the CdM news team)
