President Milo Djukanovic leaves his polling station in Podgorica on April 2, 2023. SAVO PRELEVIC, SAVO PRELEVIC / AFP
He was considered the longest-reigning leader in Europe, along with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Milo Djukanovic, 61, alternate Prime Minister and President of Montenegro since 1991, suffered a historic defeat on Sunday April 2 in the presidential elections organized in this small Balkan country known for its mafia penetration. According to counts by electoral NGOs, he received only 40% of the votes.
In his place was elected a young 36-year-old economist, Jakov Milatovic, who promised to bring this country, which has been a candidate for membership since 2010, to the European Union as soon as possible. We said goodbye to crime and corruption,” the former European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) analyst announced to his supporters. Before the election, this co-leader of the Europe now! had told Le Monde that he wanted to be “the first truly pro-European president” of Montenegro by being “an emancipator who will move the values of this country to Europe and the West”.
His election de facto marks the end of the uninterrupted power of the sulphurous Mr Djukanovic at the helm of Montenegro. This former socialist, who has dominated the local political scene since the 1990s when this country of 600,000 people was still part of Yugoslavia, had turned into an ardent nationalist in the 2000s, leading his country to independence from Serbia, the was obtained in 2006. Under his leadership, Montenegro, the smallest state in Serbia in the Balkans, then turned into the main platform for the massive Balkan mafia, which are particularly active in drug and cigarette trafficking.
“mafiocratic regime”
As a brutal reminder of these excesses, the election campaign was marked above all by the arrest a few days before the second round of the number 2 of the national police and several of his subordinates, who were accused of killing Montenegrin citizens on behalf of one of the local clans. The national police chief was subsequently fired by the government. “Until now we had a Mafiocratic regime, but with the help of Europe things are changing,” promises Mr. Milatovic, who cites that the evidence of these beatings was obtained thanks to the infiltration of Sky-ECC encrypted messages by the French, Belgian and Dutch police.
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The presidency remains primarily symbolic, but Mr Djukanovic’s defeat marks the culmination of a process that had begun in 2020 with the first failure of his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) in parliamentary elections, followed in autumn 2022 by the loss of the capital’s city hall Podgorica. Created in June 2022, Europe Now! For its part, has chained electoral victories on the basis of a centrist and very pro-business program.
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