Montenegro: A Democracy without Alternations

Montenegro is a country in which one of the main features of representative democracy has never developed: government replaceability. After regaining independence and initiating an EU accession process, externally driven changes have stimulated lively institutional transformations which, however, have failed to produce meaningful democratic competition. This article tries to shed some light on the following phenomenon: how is it possible that in a formally democratic legal framework the ruling (ex-communist) party keeps winning each national election? Apart from providing a contextual analysis, it seeks to describe a rather interesting conceptthe image of invincibility which is, together with deep national/ethnic divisions and non-participant political attitudes, believed to be one of the key ingredients of the enigma of the last uninterrupted ex-communist incumbency in the post-communist world.