Vlada

Đukanović met with the leaders of the opposition yesterday. It all looks as it should, gentlemen, there are no obstructions: Montenegro will soon have a new government.

Of course, the bazaar is buzzing, everyone has their favorites and their concept, many Montenegrins "burn towards Medo for the Government"...

The new government will probably, or at least it is to be hoped, do a lot of good things, but there is a moment when it will never be able to overcome not only the previous, recent government, but a whole series of DPS governments that has lasted for three decades... Fortunately, let's add. Namely, this and no future government will have the semi-mythical status that those governments had, certainly, they will never experience such an amount of public thanks and shameless declarations of love.

Government was a wonderful word, a substitute for all meaning, for all action. Government agendas, legends, packages, actions, programs, priorities, initiatives...

A classic magical transfer: it was a word that can do anything, a word that opens all doors: so how can one not be grateful to such a Miracle.

So, sometime in the meantime, in the Montenegrin school of democracy - where the only one with the honorary title of "champion of democracy" was treated as a Jerusalem dog, an exile and a mobster - the post card "Hvala Vladi" was born, which, before it became a parodic comment on attitude towards the authorities, often expressed even by serious people.

It was a ubiquitous mantra that got things done far more efficiently than knowledge or skill.

Even today, I hear that sentence as a refrain from those years that turned Montenegrin society into a courtly, barren and suburban one.

On the other hand, when the "nostalgic" tone started, let's remember that this word had an equally powerful effect on the so-called gray areas of society.

You remember the slurs from the nineties, when "connections with the Government" were most valued. There wasn't a fraudster who wouldn't tell you in the third minute of the conversation - "I'm doing something for the government". Actually, there were variations. This form "for the Government" suggested a presence in one of the backwaters of the border world of smuggling. That presence was highly valued by an ordinary, declassified citizen. The form "I do something with the Government" was relatively benign, reserved for broad classes of citizens, while the wording "I do something with the Government" referred to the serious world of business. It was a time when the reputation of many was decisively shaped by such fraudulent games.

The government organized the whole society, including the gray areas - back then, let's remember, smuggling was a state business. And the society, in fact, was - the government's pretense of the existence of society.

After the division of the DPS, the dominance of the emancipatory discourse on the public scene will not silence that poltroonic nerve of the domestic population, on the contrary, it is playful, despite the (only verbal) conquest of European values.

If Montenegrins do not thank the new government so much, it will not mean that the government did nothing, but that they worked seriously.

To a large extent, the DPS government was able to cope with the worst in the Montenegrin mentality. The love of power experienced an unprecedented momentum. Although the history of CG is full of that, the impression is that the star heights were reached precisely in this, just ended, epoch...

It would be good if the new composition of the Government is aware of the need for healing discontinuity in such matters.

Also, it is important to understand that even the public service should not be a mirror of that court matrix... which is so tough in Montenegro. Here, now and there, freedom seekers are advertising themselves, it seems that they have just woken up from their winter sleep.

By the way, in the era of socialism, that word didn't even exist. Then we had the "Executive Council", and who will say "Thank you to the Executive Council". They wouldn't have understood him then, let alone today. And then you knew who to thank.

As long as this and such a model of gratitude is the basis of the Montenegrin public scene and politics, Montenegro will be far from a normal society.