Friday, May 12 - Saint Basil's Day, glory and grace to him, but not because of his contribution to Orthodoxy as a whole, but for some very secular and personal reasons.
Today, the government adopted information on the need to support print media.
Well, she made things a little more complicated by explaining that general social interest: for the sake of providing comprehensive information to employees in public institutions, achieving media pluralism and promoting professional and independent journalism...
- It is very important to protect the print media, because some such media in the world have gone out of business - simplified the outgoing Prime Minister Dritan Abazović.
It is easy to understand and my personal interest - by shutting down the printed News, I would also shut down. Because I think about internet journalism the same way I did at the time of its creation.
Therefore, thank you to the Government of Montenegro that my columns will be printed until the end of the year.
Maybe even later, if the incoming Prime Minister Milojko Spajić remains committed not only to technological progress in the virtual future, but also to the technical achievements of the real past...
* * *
Saturday, May 13 - Of the future prime minister's sense of reality, I am more concerned about the increasingly frequent absence of that sense in part of the non-governmental sector. And to the one whose work once deserved the highest marks.
Two hours after the Government's announcement about the first attempt to save the print media, its legal basis was called into question.
- Did the Government ask for and receive a positive opinion from the Agency for the Protection of Competition - asked CGO, even though the decision on aid refers to all daily newspapers in Montenegro.
Whose competitiveness should be protected then?...
Media from the environment?...
Maybe local ones, whose protection local communities are responsible for anyway...
Or electronic ones, as can be concluded after reminding "that CGO also criticized when the Government of Zdravko Krivokapić made a decision to help commercial TV broadcasters".
Yes, but what does that have to do with trying to save print media?
Well, Montenegrin daily newspapers have not met the conditions to be commercial for years, at least not in the basic linguistic sense.
If we believe Krleža's SH/HS dictionary, from the era when even newspapers with a small market could live on circulation, commercial means:
- favorable from a commercial point of view; on which/what profit can be made; profitable.
- which is profitable, but without other values...
Expecting profitability from medieval civilizational achievements, such as the printing of books, and later newspapers, is really not realistic today.
But the reality is that newspapers and books are cultural assets in themselves, there is no law that can limit their protection.
And that is why it is senseless to protect the state budget from a few hundred thousand euros of annual costs. Or school budgets from wasting money on five - or fifteen - copies of the newspaper...
And that in a year when media freedom in Montenegro progressed from 63rd to 39th place.
Three places ahead of Croatia. Which, by the way, started the aforementioned rescue of print media a decade and a half ago.
Not because newspapers can now significantly contribute to media freedom, but because the achievements of civilization are preserved as long as possible...
By the way, in that neighboring country, 82 percent of the population has access to the Internet.
This sense of reality is a miracle, in Montenegro, almost half still do not know how to use social networks.
* * *
Sunday, May 14 - It seems that the Democratic Front's mantra "foreign embassies will not decide on..." has finally become a reality.
Last week, for all parties, only one was enough...
The Democratic Party of Socialists suddenly renounced its old cadres. Mostly hated, both among the membership, and in the prosecutor's office...
The election list was left to a young man, who resembles his predecessors so unbearably that the non-hated membership massively switches to the Europe Now Movement.
The Democratic Front, after eleven years, also suddenly - disintegrated.
The New Serbian Democracy and the Democratic People's Party remain together, after the latter became the first on the election list.
Another surprise is the third coalition partner, the Workers' Party. Not because its president got only 15th place, but because it is not natural for the multi-ethnic base of a left-wing party to expect any gain from drowning in a dominantly uni-national right-wing coalition...
The biggest surprise, however, is the breakaway of the Movement for Change. But not because it was not announced, but because of the way it was explained.
And you really should have had the nerve to address the membership and sympathizers like this, after eleven years spent in the shadow of NSD and DNP:
- We are starting a new chapter, we are returning to our original values and we are going on the path of reforms and European integration!
And how far the PzP has brought the old chapter and how much it will cost him to move away from those original values for a decade - he will be informed by the deregistered sympathizers on June 11.
It's a pity, but not only because of the failure of that original Europe Now movement from 2006. But even more so because of the rise of its Chinese copy from 2023.
The massing of PES with personnel from the DPS is increasingly reminiscent of the Brussels syndrome, i.e. the political situation in the EU headquarters after the Europeanization of the Balkan states turned into the Balkanization of the European community.
Well, that's how this Europeanization of DPS personnel will end with the de-Peeization of PES.
Those who do not believe, should remember how the Social Democratic Party fared. Not just in the past, but two nights ago.
It looks goofy, but it was a little short of working.
The Main Board of the DPS announced that it will participate in the elections (i) with the SDP an hour and a half before the vote in the Main Board of the SDP...
And not only that, but he entered the vice-president of that party in fifth place on the election list before the party had decided whether it would join the coalition at all, let alone who its candidates would be...
Unprecedented and without a down payment, they left the thirteenth and fourteenth place to two others.
And then, around 23.30:XNUMX p.m., the SDP broke - it will go to the elections independently. With a difference of one vote, if the media count of support is to be believed.
The number of supporters of Raško Konjević's decision to leave the presidential office, parliamentary seat and politics - has not been announced.
* * *
Monday, May 15 - The number of guests at the reception after the inauguration of the President was announced.
Seven hundred (and number: 700), true unofficially.
If so, I sincerely hope that it is only due to the state protocol that the sense of reality has been lost.
Until the state president, now it is already definite, was the decision not to have the ceremony in Cetinje.
Definitely wrong, not only on a symbolic level.
Five days before taking office, Jakov Milatović also made a mistake in his explanation.
Despite his wish, holding the inauguration in Podgorica will not mean "additional improvement of democratic practice in Montenegro".
But underestimating the democratic practice in Cetinje.
The choice of the capital cannot be justified by the fact that "the very act of officially taking the oath of the President should be in front of the members of the Assembly".
The Assembly sat many times in the capital, and on much less important occasions.
That's why I doubt that the President's "attitude towards Cetinje as the capital will be best expressed by his future very active participation in the Senate of the capital"...
Instead of trusting in that long-term and uncertain activity, one immediate and one-time action would be more certain...
That President Jakov Milatović - together with his family - move to the Residence...
This is how he will show his attitude towards Cetinje, just as the citizens of Cetinje show their attitude towards the President...
And it would also be useful for the rest of Montenegro - to make sure that at least one investment of his predecessor was - justified...
Bonus video:
