In “Time for Europe’s longest-serving ruler to go” (POLITICO, February 22), the author suggests that the way out of Montenegro’s predicament would be to look inward and select a replacement for President Milo Ðukanović from within the ruling party.
The author’s suggestion that two figures within the ruling party — Prime Minister (and former secret police chief) Duško Marković and former Finance Minister Igor Luksić — could lead Montenegro into the future is wrong for several reasons.
First, he failed to acknowledge the ruling party’s role in creating a rotten political system, focusing instead on its most prominent representative. The idea that the party has a “healthy core” that could produce a new political “bright star” is simply not true.
The author’s protegés — Marković and Luksić — have both been key players in this rotten structure. By writing them a letter of recommendation, the author is doing a disservice to the goal he claims to be championing: Montenegro’s path to a true democracy.
Ðukanović should step down and answer for what he has done. But the system he created – with ample assistance from his Western partners — also has to be dismantled.
Second, the author also ignored and delegitimized the opposition’s efforts to combat electoral fraud, corruption, the black market economy, links between organized crime and politics, and the intimidation of political opponents. While many opposition politicians and activists in Montenegro advocate nationalist and expansionist policies with which I vehemently disagree, it is unfair to paint the entire opposition with a broad brush as the author has done.
To minimize the opposition’s important work will only help to salvage the political wreckage of Ðukanović’s ruling party.
Montenegro needs true democratic reforms, not an “in-house” personnel shuffle.
Srdja Pavlović
Research fellow, Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada