He accepted to lead the Government at a time of political crisis whose depths are worrying and with no end in sight. His boss has installed part of his people in his cabinet, dissatisfaction with staffing is simmering in the party, the distribution of the power pie in terms of depth is going at a snail's pace, and his traditionally obedient partner is creating problems for him. Several hundred mothers, who have three or more children, are protesting in front of the parliament because of the reduction in benefits. That is a summary of the hundred days of Prime Minister Duško Marković's government, whose political credibility is on ever-thinning ice.
According to Stevo Muk from the Alternative Institute, this government held power for the first hundred days in a situation of the deepest political crisis and an atmosphere of a prolonged coup d'état, on the one hand, and an opposition boycott of institutions, on the other.
"The government failed to initiate serious negotiations with the opposition, and it failed to convince a part of the opposition to return to the Assembly. In addition to numerous statements, which more or less resemble each other, the government did not offer a concrete platform for dialogue with the opposition," reminds Muk. It is difficult, he says, to talk about the successes and failures of this Government because the time was spent mainly on consolidating the functioning of the new team and two big stories - the coup d'état and state benefits for mothers with three or more children: "Both stories are full of controversies, started upside down and entangled, and untangling is slow and painful".
The impression is that there is dissatisfaction with staffing in the party. Some former ministers do not refrain from publicly showing their dissatisfaction with being moved to the parliament. Thus, Petar Ivanović, as the president of the parliamentary committee, was the first to announce his expectations regarding the negotiating chapters on agriculture, which he did to the new-old minister of agriculture, Milutin Simović, to whom that right belonged.
While party activists criticize him for the fact that seven of the 19 departments in the government, including the one without a portfolio, were given to members of minority nations, Marković admitted that he felt the "blackmail tones" of the new most influential coalition partner - the Bosniak Party - which prevented Njegošev from declare the day of birth a public holiday.
"It seems that the process of consolidating the new government has been slow, that it is still not finished and that the government is not functioning at full capacity and in an efficient manner," says Muk.
The election of Marković as a candidate was a surprise for a large part of the public, where one could get the impression that he too was surprised by the election due to the long duration of the post-election coalition negotiations with the traditionally obedient BS, Social Democrats and Albanian parties. His first public appearances and moves showed that Đukanović was not the conspicuous frontman of the campaign by chance and that he was not running it for Marković, but for himself. Starting with the fact that, as those familiar with the distribution of power claim, Marković's cabinet includes Đukanović's personal banker - Finance Minister Darko Radunović, and personal urban planner Pavle Radulović - Minister of Tourism and Sustainable Development.
Every now and then Đukanović is the prime minister and publicly reminds who is the boss in the house. Starting from the moment when he announced to the media when the mandate for the composition of the new government will announce the work program and the personnel composition of the executive power, to more than harsh criticism towards Moscow, which at the very beginning greeted the election of the new Montenegrin prime minister with mild rhetoric. "I believe that your actions will contribute to the improvement of constructive Russian-Montenegro cooperation," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in his congratulatory message to Marković.
Muk says that there is a statement that this is a government of continuity that will not make major changes in politics and governance practices. The government, he underlines, is directed by the political program of the DPS, election promises and agreements with minority parties, and there is a significant influence of the president of the DPS and the informal circles of political and economic power around him. In addition to the incident in the Parliament when the members of the Democratic Front verbally attacked their colleagues from the DPS, the previous three months were also marked by the irritatingly lenient judgments of the former mayors of Bar and Nikšić, Žarko Pavićević and Nebojša Radojičić, as well as the election of Zoran Jelic as a member of the State Audit Institution (DRI). "The possibilities of Duško Marković are more limited by the traditional, established patterns of action of the ruling party and the state, and now especially by the empty budget and weak economic prospects. In addition, previously created obligations are coming to be paid, and everything leads to the fact that some painful reform cuts will have to be made, and this can again lead to a decline in public confidence", Muk assesses.
The leader of the Social Democratic Party, Ranko Krivokapić, said about a hundred days ago that Marković is just a "bankruptcy administrator".
Whether Montenegro will emerge from bankruptcy or whether it will go bankrupt will also depend on the last frames of the "coup d'état", when we will find out whether it was a soap opera or a thriller.
They are successfully painting the entire opposition in the colors of the Democratic Front
Muk notes that in the previous period the government managed to impose itself additionally as a favorite of NATO members and a victim of Russia's meddling policy.
"The messages that Marković sent were contradictory, because at the same time he invited the opposition to join the Government, even though it will not join the Assembly, while together with Đukanović, he called them a coup d'état and called them traitors. The messages sent by the government, in the context of geopolitical circumstances, are welcome in a part of the international community even when they have no real foundation. The government, for example, quite succeeds in painting the entire opposition in the colors of the DF," said the director of the Alternative Institute.
A way out of the 2018 general election crisis.
According to Muk, this government will continue to face its own internal weaknesses, and especially the challenges of running a sustainable economic and social policy, where, as he states, one of the key challenges is revenue collection, especially accumulated debts.
"If the desire for dialogue prevails, this political crisis can be resolved in 2018 with extraordinary elections at all levels, including the presidential one. By then, the conditions for their implementation would have to be prepared. "Also, before those elections, they would have to get an answer to the question of what happened on October 16 last year and whether there is any responsibility on the part of the politicians," says Muk.
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