After Đukanović, it's the turn of Izetbegović, Dodik and...

Sali Berisha 2013, Nikola Gruevski 2016, Hasim Thaci 2020, Milo Đukanović 2023... Who is next? Bakir Izetbegović and Milorad Dodik. One by one, the Balkan autocrats and kleptocrats, or the flagships of illiberal democracies and hybrid regimes, are leaving the main political stages. True, slower than the citizens would like, but faster than they hoped.

Berisha was banned from entering the USA and Great Britain due to corruption and ties to organized crime. Gruevski is in exile in Hungary with Viktor Orban. Thaci is in prison and under trial for war crimes in Kosovo. Đukanović's mandate expires on May 21, and many are wondering where he will be on May 22?

The DPS leader faces a very difficult choice. Whether to save himself, or to defend what he has acquired and represented throughout his entire career. The fate of the party that cheered and dressed Montenegro for more than thirty years is in Milo's hands. Paradoxically, the only option that Đukanović cannot afford is a peaceful political retirement in Montenegro after 34 years in power.

In the event that the outgoing president remains in the country and is ready to respond to everything that awaits him, DPS will have a chance to survive, consolidate, give birth to new leaders and survive on the political stage of Montenegro. However, if Đukanović leaves Montenegro, the DPS will experience, in the best case, the fate of the Greek PASOK, the Israeli Labor Party or the French Socialist Party, which "live" around the electoral census, while in the worst case scenario, it will end up like the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) whose historical leader Bettino Craxi died as a fugitive in Tunisia because he did not want to be arrested and prosecuted for corruption in Italy.

The negative campaign of presenting Jakov Milatović and the parties that supported him in the presidential elections as Serbian or even Russian "Trojan horses" in the North Atlantic Alliance and the family of Western democracies, returned like a boomerang to its authors in folk style: it does not snow to cover the mountain, but to every animal leaves a mark.

In the previous period, while some politicians, intellectuals, analysts, members of the civil sector, journalists, in the country, the region and the EU, left their mark by presenting the change of government in Montenegro as a Serbian and Russian scourge, in the offices of the most important capitals of the Old Continent, including Brussels, Montenegro was taken as a model of how to act in Bosnia and Herzegovina and get the country out of the grip of corruption and organized crime.

Namely, in our regional as well as European environment, there are people who have been successfully masking their Serbophobia for three decades thanks to Slobodan Milošević and a good part of the Serbian political and intellectual elite, who are extremely anti-Western. These persons built careers and personal well-being by presenting chauvinism towards Serbs as a pro-Western commitment, just as on the opposite side they dressed up anti-Western hysteria as Serbian patriotism.

Apart from pro-European Serbia, the biggest victim of the aforementioned two lucrative narratives was Montenegro. It served the former to show that the Serbs are an irredeemably anti-Western element - remember the recent public opinion survey by a non-governmental organization in which Serbs from Montenegro were presented as retrograde - while it was proof to the Serbian ultra-nationalists gathered around obscure portals that the EU and NATO are irredeemably anti-Serbian.

The new political wave in Montenegro and the new generation of politicians overthrew the equation according to which Serbs are either "Seselj" or "Canak", or their "light" versions. That is why they were exposed to dirty propaganda and spreading, to put it euphemistically, untruths and subterfuges from both sides.

In essence, history repeats itself only in its diametrical edition: just as for King Nikola, 120 years ago, any kind of democratic government in Belgrade was a danger, so for the current regime in Belgrade, it is a nightmare that Montenegro, in which it really it doesn't matter who is a Montenegrin and who is a Serb, be a successful, exemplary member of NATO and strive for membership in the EU. Concrete proof that the political representatives of the Serbian and Montenegrin people can be different, outside of the "Seselj-Čanak" scheme.

So, while the DPS tried to show that they see the new government in the EU as pro-Russian and pro-Serbian, in Brussels and in the EU institutions they very positively evaluated the work of the chief special prosecutor Vladimir Novović and his team, as well as the changes in the prosecution and the entire apparatus which works to detect corruption, organized crime and other criminal acts. "We have been waiting for 15 years for the prosecution to wake up in Montenegro and start doing its job", was the statement we heard in several background briefings with contacts in leading EU members who are familiar with the Montenegrin file.

The EU would like to see the prescription from Montenegro applied to Bosnia and Herzegovina. That is, to create political conditions, as was the case with Montenegro after the elections on August 30, 2020, to form a new prosecutor's office that would not be under the control of politicians and criminals, led by new professional and expert staff. Because of this, Bakir Izetbegović and Milorad Dodik became nervous and very aggressive in their political performances in the last few months. They know that political changes in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina are a prelude to serious reforms in the judiciary at the entity level and then at the state level.

In this context, the first task is the expulsion of the SDA from the government structures and Bakir Izetbegović. The SDA is perceived in the EU institutions as the party most responsible for the endemic corruption in BiH and as long as it is part of the government, as was the case with the DPS in Montenegro, there will be no progress in respecting the rule of law and in building an independent and professional judicial system.

The President of Republika Srpska has opened too many fronts, and his room for maneuver has narrowed. Dodik has become a classic example of a politician from Lincoln's maxim who promised to do what he cannot do and now has to do what he must not do. In other words, Dodik made too many promises to Moscow that he cannot fulfill, and since the Americans have become quite active, both directly and indirectly, in BiH and the Western Balkans in the last year, there is no room for him to do "what is not sme", and that's why he's quite nervous. Among other things, because he made promises to the western side.

Relations between Dodik and Dragan Čović, the leader of the Croats in BiH, cooled. Their personal alliance lost weight with the new alliances in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it was also called into question with Croatia's new position in the North Atlantic Alliance and in Zagreb's relations vis-a-vis Washington. Since Dodik's and Čović's alliance is not an expression of the interests of Serbs and Croats in BiH, but of their personal affinities, it could produce significant changes that make Dodik increasingly uneasy.

The European Union is cautious and has not yet decided how to act towards Dodik. The strategy is not to take measures until the government is definitively formed at all levels in BiH, but also until a very important episode in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina is finished.