Good morning! Abazovic has been saying one sentence for a couple of weeks now, proving that he is not up to the task of leading the government; the SNP is still delaying the election of government; since Nikolaidis published his text everyone has started to talk about technical government as the only real option; from SDP to DF, while Carevic is participating in the Serbian political campaign, Budva’s parliament was dissolved, and a committee of commissioners was elected.
How is Dritan telling us he’s not up to the task of being pm?
For a couple of weeks now, the DPM of the outgoing Krivokapic-Abazovic government (this should be used as a name for the 42nd Government of Montenegro for historiography, to remain as Cvetkovic-Macek), has been saying one sentence showing how much leadership he has based on mere and empty, meaningless performance. That performance is often receptive to the audience. It is funny, interesting, it breaks the current cravings about how a politician should behave. In the sea of grayness of Montenegrin politicians, who do not have a shred of spontaneity, because everything they say is prepared in advance and takes a long time, people like Dritan Abazovic and his friend Milan Knezevic come as a bomb of variegation. Variety in politics is often camouflage, which sometimes serves to hide ignorance and incompetence, and sometimes very dangerous and insidious intentions.
However, politics, which is dominated by performance and variety, has always carried with it the risk of instability. Examples are numerous, from Duce to Trump.
But let’s go back to how Abazovic himself tells us that he is seriously not up to the task: For several weeks now, he has been persistently repeating that he had personally completed his work on forming the government, and, if I understood correctly, two weeks from the moment the President gave him the mandate, he said: “When I took over the prime minister-designate position, I said that I needed 14 days to form the Government. After those 14 days, I had everything ready, but some political constituents have been and are still tactical. They waited for the completion of elections in Berane and Ulcinj, but now some want another position in the minority government. I hope Montenegro will get a government soon”.
This moment of relinquishing responsibility and washing one’s hands of potential failure tells us how dangerous it is to elect this man prime minister. In American leadership studies, this is called excuse-based leadership. Such leadership is considered leadership with the least degree of responsibility.
Responsibility starts from the top and the leader leads by example. If he sets out to justify failures with excuses, such a pattern of behavior descends down the hierarchy at the speed of light. When Abazovic starts to justify himself and seeks excuses for his failure in the inaction of ministers, then the Minister of Justice, for example, starts to apologize for his failures resulting from lazy judges, lazy judges for those resulting from lazy prosecutors, lazy prosecutors for those resulting from lazy police officers and so on, indefinitely. In the end, an employee in the city’s public cleaning services justifies himself for the dirty city by saying that citizens throw garbage. That is why our cities and roads are so dirty and littered with waste.
The SNP is blocking the election of the government and delaying it, and now Jokovic allegedly agrees to the participation of SDP and SD, but only if his main board makes a decision by a two-thirds majority. Jokovic is guided here by the example of Abazovic, and out of fear of decision-making and failure, he shifts the responsibility to the collective decision-making body.
This means that, if Dritan does not make a final decision, we will have to wait for another saga of scheduling and holding a session of the SNP.
There is another option, and that is the technical government, which is back in the game after the text published by Andrej Nikolaidis, and which the DF and the SDP immediately embraced. The DF openly says technical government, and the always creative SDP calls it “an appropriate legal-political model that would guarantee a fair election process”.
We’ll see. Basically, everything is up to Dritan, not in the last couple of weeks, but since August 2020. We’ve all seen well what it looks like. I don’t know what would be different now. But, we don’t have much choice.
Budva parliament dissolved
While Bato Carevic is cheering for Vucic in the elections in Serbia, the government dissolved the local parliament. As you know, last week, I applied for a member of the compulsory administration, and for the first time I am telling you that I was shortlisted according to references and after an interview with the ministry I entered the shortlist of candidates. To be clear, I did not have illusions from the beginning that despite the good intentions of part of the administration, I can pass political resistance and hurt the vanity of PM Krivokapic, DPM Abazovic and other ministers, which I did not spare in my comments and analyzes of the administration.
However, after seeing the names on the committee of commissioners last night, I can tell you that I am optimistic and surprised with a couple of great selections, and that if there is determination, courage and will, these people, with public support, can limit Carevic’s arbitrariness and dismiss him, after all, because the law allows them to do so, and thus guarantee a more or less fair game in the upcoming local elections. The new GST Novovic could help them there, if he puts Carevic’s cases in the priorities of his work.
Where is Pozdnyakov?
After public protests, and after condemnations of the Russian extremist’s threats to Sasa Zekovic were joined by NGOs such as the Human Rights Action, the Civic Alliance and the Center for Democratic Transition, the Police Directorate said it still claimed that Pozdnyakov was not in Montenegro. Pozdnyakov wrote again in his group yesterday afternoon, justifying that he did not make any threats, saying in the text that he was still in the country, showing a fairly good knowledge of our security system. The irresponsibility or incompetence of the police and the ANB in this case best shows what kind of problem we as a country are in when it comes to security.
That’s it for today. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst
