“Current situation on our political scene is very complicated as it never was in the 25 year long Montenegrin parliamentary history. The very fact that 12 of 81 MPs in the Montenegrin Parliament are independent, or 15%, shows enough about it. We, as political actors, cannot manage to comprehend who belongs where and who represents whom and with what legitimacy. Then, how could an average voter feel,“ Mr Popovic said.
He added that the question for the relevant public authorities (without expecting any answer) was whether these divisions within the most political parties had been caused accidentally or they were a result of an orchestrated ‘splitting’”.
On the one hand, as he said, it would be normal to organise early parliamentary elections, which would “untie” the current political “Gordian Knot”.
“On the other hand, it is unlikely to happen before the spring of 2016, when the adopted electoral legislation is expected to be implemented, with a very important electronic identification of voters. I do not believe that the majority of political actors would agree on early parliamentary elections if the new electoral legislation could not be applied,” he said.
Asked how the Liberal Party would participate in the elections in case of their calling, Mr Popovic said that the LP started preparations to run independently in regular or early general elections in 2016.
“We have a solid party infrastructure in almost all municipalities in the country. We have been significantly strengthened, particularly in the last year, which gives us hope that we can pass the election threshold on our own, with increased effort, particularly in the media plan. In the current situation on the Montenegrin political scene there is no party, except for the DPS, that could surely count on staying above the 3% threshold if it ran independently in the general elections. Therefore, there will be various political ‘columns’ in the next election and I believe some of them would be astonishing,” he said, among other things.
