In the bureaucratic rigidity of SFRY politics, voters were used to (yes, there were various elections in that monopartism as well) the conservative appearance of politicians in power. There were far fewer of them in the media, they talked less, they didn't fight publicly, and their privacy was a taboo subject. From that conservative-bureaucratic molding, little emerged that would show their psychological character and thereby make them some more striking personalities, so most of the people could not guess from the first who, say, Dušan Čkrebić and who was Tihomir Vlaškalić, even though they are both covered high political positions. The only one who could become a celebrity was Tito, but tompus, pianos, poodles and shot capitals were in the function of clearly letting the people know who is Jupiter and who are bulls. Since the beginning of the nineties, the political scene has truly become a scene. On it, thanks to the media, politics will increasingly take on the elements of show business, and as time goes by, reality TV. Instead of bureaucrats veiled in conspiracy, flesh and blood people will appear to the people, and in some cases even the blood of politicians will appear, which started with the blood on the head of a not very formal politician, but a great writer who rather illusionistically dabbled in politics and , luckily for literature, he left it forever.
Thanks to the tearing of the curtain that once separated the public from the private life of politicians, in the next three decades people will see everything - how a politician looks when he's drunk, how he looks when he's barefoot in the Parliament, and how he looks when he's in "damage", how he fights, how he sings, how he steals, how he brokers, and thanks to the frenzied paparazzo-tabloids and how he looks like he was born from his mother. What will also become more transparent are the changes that political power causes in the character of politicians, so it has become much more visible how power is able to dehumanize those who gain it. Not all, but many, by God, it is. Of course, the levels of alienation are different, but every government obviously obscures, to a greater or lesser extent, insight into reality. Here in the Balkans, we have seen those transformations that range from standard changes in behavior, like a little more ego, to complete destruction. We have been seeing one of these more extreme examples for a long time, especially these days, on the Serbian political scene. Psychology says that a person is often inclined to perceive the acquired power as something that can smooth out all the unevenness in his character and, in his eyes, make him the ideal solution in the system in which he is at the top of the hierarchy. Many studies have been written about this narcissistic experience of power in the political system, but in our country they are read only by those who do not see politics as their profession. The conviction of most politicians in power that they possess resistance to the deviations that this position can produce is mostly proportional to their ambitions – the greater the desire for power, the greater the conviction of the one in power to exercise it exactly as it should. This is the point from which problems begin not only with the socio-political environment that arises due to this lack of real experience of the person exercising power, but such an experience also begins to draw that person into more and more problems, making them a self-isolated decision-maker stemming from exclusively personal experiences and assessment.
When the rulers or ruling structures in a democratic society find themselves at that level of self-confidence, they usually begin to neglect what has become immanent to the population of any level of democratic organization, which is the need for them to decide their own fate. The experience of government in which the needs of the electorate, which determine it as a functional and creative political agent, are persistently overlooked, is typical of all our ruling political parties to this day. No discontent of the people, no criticism from the civil sector and the media reaches them. Even after the defeat in the August 2020 elections, the DPS leadership did not look for the causes of the defeat in a possible change in the voters' attitude towards them, but in the wrong strategy of their own pre-election campaign - insufficiently developed manipulative activities or in the absence of a coalition of Croatian parties. This awareness that success or defeat in elections depends solely on the quality of applied methods and techniques in pre-election campaigns, and not on an objective insight into the state of the electorate, from which no suggestions except those of informers are expected, still reigns supreme both in the ruling parties and and in the opposition.
Referring to the lack of real insight by the CIA and anti-Castro forces into the true state of affairs in Cuba before the Bay of Pigs incident, Hannah Arendt in her essay "The Freedom to Be Free" writes: "Although the Bay of Pigs incident is often blamed on misinformation and that the secret services failed, the fault actually lies in something much deeper. The mistake was in not understanding what it means when poverty-stricken people in a backward country, where corruption has reached the level of rot, suddenly realize, not from their poverty, but from the obscurity and therefore the incomprehensibility of their misery, what it means when they first hear that the situation in which they find themselves is openly considered, and they find themselves invited to participate in that consideration; and what does it mean when they are brought to their capital, which they have never seen before, and are told: these streets, and these squares, and these buildings, all these are yours, your property and therefore your pride. This, or something like it, happened for the first time in the French Revolution”.
Whatever one thinks about litias, they provided the opportunity for a large part of the population of Montenegro to believe, on the streets and squares of most of our cities, that it was included in the consideration of the situation in which that population found itself, and it was defined by the feeling of complete marginalization from a decision that seemed fateful to that people. The fact that the government did not understand that the people saw in that decision an intention to take away their holy places, regardless of the real basis of that suspicion, ultimately cost that government the loss of power. After they hit the ground from their party-bureaucratic heights, the ruling nomenklatura probably sought the blame in the poor work of the security services, wrong intelligence information, insufficient involvement of the party structures, in everything but the state of the state, impoverished and mired in corruption and crime . The fact that the Serbian Orthodox Church articulated the dissatisfaction of the people with its ambitions is less important than the fact that, as time passed, among the participants of the liturgy there were also those who were not particularly interested in the church issue. Anyone who still doesn't believe in that has lost his mind. To the frequent question - Why didn't the people come out for civil protests?, the answer lies in another question - And who offered those people even meaningful civil protests? Coherent protests are primarily those that have a clearly defined goal, and this - unlike workers, trade unionists, students and civil activists - Amfilohije Radović knew very well. He led those protests to his goal, and a good part of the people believed that they lead to other goals, which is what happened. The goals of the leaders of protests, revolts and revolutions and the people who participate in them are always a mixture of various ambitions, which are bound by a sufficiently recognizable common ambition. In such processes, many of these ambitions backfire, even turn against the people themselves, but the initial impulse of all these revolutionary processes is contained in what Hannah Arendt underlines, namely - a feeling awakened in the people by some system of political power to participate in considering the state of affairs in which it is located. Whether we like it or not, the Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral, along with awakening what was important to him, also awakened the above-mentioned feeling in the people. The Serbian Orthodox Church is least to blame for the fact that someone else was unable or unwilling to do so. Its strong political influence, which is probably seasoned with some other alternative secular strategies, would never have been this great if the ruling regime in Montenegro had not considered the state of the party more important than the state of the people. More precisely, that they did not think that by maintaining a strong party infrastructure, mainly through various brokering mechanisms, they could compensate for the collapse of the people's existence, and within it, in the end, a significant part of their electorate.
History shows us that the people often carried out the call to consider their destiny without a sense of responsibility, violently and bloody, but it was always a problem of articulating that initial impulse. The complexity of that articulation depends on the level and duration of the state of humiliation in the people, i.e. the duration of his exclusion from said consideration. More precisely, it depends on the level of alienation and selfishness of the government that governs that people. Which is to say - the longer this situation lasts, the more complicated the articulation of a potential popular uprising will be. Among other things, the reasons for dissatisfaction will progressively increase, more and more diverse and more bizarre possible solutions will be attached to them, and thus it will be difficult to create a consensus of all these diversities. This is roughly the situation we have in the Serbian opposition today, where the left and the right, who are equally critical, cannot reach an internal, let alone a mutual, consensus in their divisions. In recent years, the Serbian right has branched out from radical extremism, through Dverjan populism, the populist and civic right, to the simplified and radical right of Zavetnik. Of all these ideological spices, Miloš Jovanović with the New DSS took over and attached his amazed personality to that entered compilation with a CV that includes both the Sorbonne and the 63rd Paratroopers. So now you choose, right mother's son. There, the lions, there were also all kinds of smiles, but nothing truly left. From various transitional left-centrist coalitions around the replaced officials of the Democratic Party to flower-power naive non-strangers. When all this is taken into account, the question arises as to what the further articulation of a possible political change of power in Serbia would look like. It would certainly be a very complicated process, especially without a clearly defined goal. Serbia experienced with DOS that the motive of a common enemy is insufficient for any promising articulation after the change of government.
The Serbian experience is also imposing itself as instructive for the current political situation in Montenegro. But what is probably the biggest problem in any of its solutions is hidden in the fact that the political parties are exclusively looking for that solution in harmonizing their political combinatorics, which, according to them, do not concern the voters who brought them to power, because their task completed with that fetch. Or, to paraphrase Arendt once again, consideration of the fate of those voters is not the subject of those political negotiations and dealings. If there had ever been one, the structuring of our political scene would not have been carried out exclusively by partyocratic methods, political changes would not have been reduced only to the dismissal of old and new party cadres, with the aim of increasing the voting potential of parties in companies and institutions where they are recruited. This will obviously be the case until some political force begins to truly consider the situation in which the people find themselves and, perhaps, invite the people to participate in that consideration.
Bonus video:
