Get ready (I'm getting you ready) for the coming festival of demagoguery, which would be the right name for almost any election campaign in the past decades. It is, someone will say, even if to a certain extent politics is based on demagoguery, isn't there a certain demagogic impulse in almost every engagement of that kind, that is, in every request from people to trust you.
Then maybe the real question is - does this demagoguery have to be this shallow, transparent, comical, sometimes bizarre, as is the case in Montenegro? Perhaps a careful analysis of the demagogic ranges of a society would be the perfect way to get a true picture of its condition. An accurate (social) diagnosis, painfully.
Aside from everything else, the current political fortune-telling and conjuring, political everyday life, long since emptied of meaning and any kind of reformation, becomes a stage for all kinds of stunts. A verbal cabinet of wonders.
There are already interesting hints for the coming colorful demagogic mosaic - for example, the Democrat president somehow manages to achieve an unusual effect - all the talk about politics and negotiations with him sounds like some kind of Turkish series. There will be a relationship, maybe not, there is love or there is not, reciprocated or not, if it is reciprocated... if it is love... Emotional hell. However, this skill should not be underestimated.
DPS behaves like an aged lover from some The Baudelaires poems - in what mansard, forgotten by everyone, while "chewing the sweet hops of youth" (D. Kish), he still believes that it would be enough to just change his clothes and shine again. Of course, this is self-delusion, but this is exactly what the type of demagogic statement dictates - remember the good old days... If he were sincere, that call would be a suicidal act, at least in the case of someone who has ruled for thirty years. Because everything that people can remember led to this kind of chaos.
URA is not in this story. They are, in fact, more and more often in - some other story. For them, demagoguery is associated with the unprincipled extension of the provisional period at any cost, that is why the focus is on the astonishing (and astonishing) results of the government, not the future.
The guys from PES prefer a slightly more subtle demagoguery of numbers. Since everyone else is in mythic or possessive registers, they made a good choice. Of course, such a situation is not without challenges, even dangerous ones.
Nevertheless, the most explicit demagogic pearl, at least in the early phase of the campaign, comes, perhaps as expected, from Mr. Mandica, who called himself the "people's candidate". No matter how constructively he behaved in the past months, that he hardly looked like himself, it seems that the pre-election days will bring a return to the old ways. Which for a true lover of tradition is, of course, supreme satisfaction.
The term "people" has long since become quite nebulous due to its overused usage.
In older historiography, traces of which my generation remembers from textbooks, there was an almost god-creating definition of "the people" as a sinless entity. So it was explained - that the so-called upper classes (throughout history) were a "reborn" part of the people, and the real national spirit (whatever that was) was found only in the so-called ordinary "people", popularly called "broad layers", which was an ideologically motivated simplification. That is why the "peasant revolts" and "people's uprisings", which famously failed, were glorified as an expression of the authentic will of the people, and in fact, at least in part, it was a subsequent ideological projection. But you will notice that even today, with a large number of people, the term "nation" has exactly that kind of aura. Even with the "people's candidate".
It is clear that Mr. Mandić believes that even the self-proclaimed status of the "people's candidate" brings him a key advantage in the campaign. However, the highlight is the triad "people - mafia - embassies" which the "people's candidate" insists on. This is exactly the kind of banal simplification that always reduces him to the "duke of the shank" in the end. I don't believe that even in Montenegro, that kind of corruption can bring something good.
Bonus video:
