Good morning! Apart from ethnic and religious groups, people in Montenegro often, knowingly or unknowingly, lock themselves in ideological trenches. How often in Montenegro the terms “left”, “right”, “center” are used too easily, people are often labeled as communists, liberals or conservatives, right-wingers. However, there’s a lack of knowledge about which system represents which beliefs and about their key values.
Montenegrins and Ideology
First of all, I want to note that in this concrete case the term Montenegrins does not prejudge one’s ethnic, national or gender identity, but for the purposes of this text, it refers to all citizens of Montenegro.
This is not a topic we’re used to discussing. If we exclude the urban human rights and NGO elite from Podgorica, which quite clearly articulates its left-wing ideology, like the other day at the celebration of March 8 using the decor of the communist resistance movement and Yugoslav communist flags, political and public actors have a problem to clearly define which ideology they advocate for although it doesn’t look like that at the beginning.
In Montenegro, we have ethnic parties on one side and civil parties on the other. After 2020, a part of the ethno-religious Serbian parties moved to the civic side, which until then was reserved for parties to which mostly ethnic Montenegrins and members of non-majority ethnic communities belonged.
The members of the New Serbian Democracy did not shy away from conservatism, nor do they today, but neither do the marginal Movement for Changes (PzP), which Nebojsa Medojevic tried to profile as a local version of the MAGA movement in the US. Nebojsa Medojevic, along with the young ideologue Fedja Pavlovic, was one of the first to try to ride the wave of right-wing populism and create a Montenegrin conservative movement, but he was eaten up by the realities of coalition for the DF. The NSD led by Andrija Mandic, and its predecessors in the form of the Serbian People’s Party and the People’s Party, tried to develop themselves as a continuation of the conservative political movement in Montenegro, but the problem is that both then and now they defined themselves as a Serbian and Pan-Serb movement rather than as a local Montenegrin authentic product.
The Montenegrin left has deeper roots and a continuous connection with its proto-party KP of Montenegro and SK of Montenegro. DPS is their legal successor, while SDP, SD and later the green parties Pozitivna and URA were formed from the youth wing of the Montenegrin Communist Party.
The Liberal Alliance was an authentic and specific political project that identified itself as an offshoot of liberal ideology, with a strong identity-based national energy, understandable at a time when the existence of an independent Montenegrin nation was denied. You see similar phenomena among Canadian liberals today. Therefore, the liberal ideology is not purely cosmopolitan and non-national, although LSCG was a rare party from the beginning, which, along with SDP, represented the idea of Montenegro’s membership in the EU and NATO.
Ethnic minority parties define themselves in different ways, but in essence, they’re right-wing and conservative-oriented parties, which is totally natural considering that they address voters cherishing conservative values.
The conservative idea is based on the insistence on the importance of the community, the Burkean traditional conservative idea is skeptical of individual performance and sees in tradition and accumulated knowledge and experience a guide for finding meaning in the chaotic present. And the present is always like that. With the fact that the conservative movement is not a monolithic social organization and they differ from individualists who are skeptical of state power, to the religious right and ethno-nationalists who believe that the state should prescribe a certain social morality.
The liberals emphasize freedom as a supreme value, however, there are nuances among them, from those who are skeptical of any role of the state, such as anarcho-capitalists, to liberals who justify state intervention by providing minimum conditions that should ensure equal opportunities.
The left is a complicated thing here. In our country, all movements include treated communists, that is, members of the left-wing authoritarian movement seeing many profiles here – the coordinator and manager of socio-economic relations and the means to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will lead us to a brilliant utopian future through benign hatred. Since then, the communists in Montenegro have landed who mostly cosmetically identify with the anti-fascist communist movement, even though they flirt a lot with national and ethnic ideas, and even though they don’t hate capitalism, especially the crony capitalism they can manage.
The left in its original form believes that people are cooperative and rational beings and opposes the accumulation of wealth and power, although through Leninism and Stalinism and other communist practices it has distanced itself from its core and produced a “new class”, which assumed extra values only in a different way.
The point of this text is not to advocate this or that ideology. In each of the mentioned ideologies there are some good things, some good signs for certain social dilemmas and problems. If we educate ourselves as a society, maybe we’ll start using some of those good instructions, without shouting empty slogans.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Best regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer and columnist
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily those of the CdM news team)