Montenegro General Election: June 11, 2023

[DavidB.]

Evropa Sad + "pro-Serbian" allies are definitely going to win this. Milatovic will have his parliamentary majority. On the ground I'd say Milatovic billboards outnumber Djukanovic's by 10:1. Djukanovic always had a fragile but semi-comfortable majority of people identifying as Montenegrin. The problem for him occurred when meddling into church politics. There is a segment of voters who consider themselves Montenegrin and pro-independence but do not want their church to secede. Djukanovic lost these voters and this tipped the scale in favor of Milatovic, who has been careful in balancing his politics regarding Serbia. All in all, I think this is a healthy development from a democratic perspective.

Geographically, Herceg-Novi, Budva and the mountainous inland up North are more "pro-Serbian", Cetinje and the areas bordering Albania (often with many Albanians, like Ulcinj) are "pro-Montenegrin" and the Kotor Bay area and Podgorica are bellwethers.

[DavidB.]

Don't immediately see a path to a majority here. Expected Evropa Sad! to do much better. Clearly turnout plummeting didn't help them - on face value (take this with a grain of salt though) it looks like turnout among pro-Montenegrin voters was better than turnout among pro-Serb voters, while I would have expected the opposite after Milatovic' win. However, it could be good for democratic consolidation in Montenegro if ES has to build a slightly awkward coalition and doesn't have the opportunity to turn into a DPS 2.0 - or into a Montenegrin version of Serbian SNS.