Montenegro's politics: a constitution built on supermajorities

What the Montenegrin constitution puts beyond a simple majority

The constitution in force was adopted by the Constitutional Parliament on 19 October 2007 with the two-thirds majority it required, proclaimed three days later, and revised in 2013. It replaced the constitution of 1992, the year Montenegro joined Serbia in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its first article calls Montenegro an independent and sovereign state with a republican form of government, and "a civil, democratic, ecological and the state of social justice, based on the rule of law".

Most of the text can be amended by parliament alone, through a slow sequence. A proposal needs two-thirds of all 81 members, a draft act needs two-thirds again, the draft then goes to a public hearing of at least a month, and the final act needs a third two-thirds vote. A proposal that fails may not be tabled again for a year, and no change may be made during a state of war or emergency.

Article 157 adds a further lock to nine articles. A change to Articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 15 and 45, and to Article 157 itself, is final only "if minimum three-fifths of all the voters support the change in the national referendum". Those articles cover the state and its republican form, sovereignty, the territory, the flag and arms and anthem, citizenship, language, foreign relations and the right to vote.

Article 15 is the one that answers the question Montenegro spent the twentieth century arguing about. It says Montenegro "shall not enter into a union with another state by which it loses its independence and full international personality". The referendum of 2006 needed 55% of the valid votes and a turnout of at least half the register. Read against the register, three-fifths of all voters is a bar of 60%, where the vote for independence reached about 47.6% of the voters registered in 2006. The phrase "all the voters" is the constitution's own, and the text does not define it further.

The same article carries a second instruction that points the other way. "The Parliament shall decide on the manner of accession to the European Union", it says, so the constitution bars one kind of union outright and hands the procedure for another to a parliamentary vote.

How Montenegro elects its parliament

The parliament, the Skupština, has one chamber of 81 members elected for four years. The whole country is a single constituency, the lists are closed, and seats are divided by the D'Hondt method among lists that win at least 3% of the valid votes. Six thousand voters may also propose a law, through a member of parliament they authorise. Parliament meets in two regular sessions a year, from the first working day of March to the end of July and from the first working day of October to the end of December.

The election law itself dates from 1998 and, by the account of the OSCE election observation mission in its final report of 11 December 2023, had not been amended by parliament since 2014. The constitution requires a two-thirds majority for changes to the laws governing the electoral system. The observers recorded that opposition parties had largely stayed away from the parliamentary committees on electoral reform, and that a draft election law prepared in 2019 was never tabled. The Constitutional Court did change the law in 2016, 2017 and 2020, each time by striking a provision out.

For the early election of 11 June 2023 the register held 542,468 voters, 305,324 cast a ballot, and turnout was 55.31%.

The election of June 2023 returned nine lists to the chamber. Europe Now won 24 seats in 2023 on 25.53% of the valid votes. A coalition led by the Democratic Party of Socialists and running as Together won 21 on 23.22%. For the Future of Montenegro, the list of New Serb Democracy, the Democratic People's Party and the Workers' Party, won 13 on 14.74%, and Courage Counts, the centrist bloc of United Reform Action and Democratic Montenegro, won 11 on 12.48%. The Bosniak Party took six seats, the SNP and DEMOS list two, the Albanian Forum two, the Albanian Alliance one and the Croatian Civic Initiative one. The Social Democratic Party won 2.98% and no seats, The observers calculated that had it and the Justice for All list both cleared the bar, each would have taken two seats and the first three lists would have had fewer.

Women won 17 of the 81 seats in June 2023, which is 20.9%. The law requires one candidate in four on every list to be of the under-represented sex and that sex to make up at least 30% of the list. Of the 1,113 candidates registered that year, 397 were women.

How minority lists reach the Montenegrin parliament

Montenegro records no ethnic majority. The 2023 census counted 41.1% of citizens as Montenegrins, 32.9% as Serbs, 9.45% as Bosniaks and 4.99% as Albanians, with smaller Roma, Croat and other communities. The constitution makes Montenegrin the official language, puts the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets on an equal footing, and places Serbian, Bosniac, Albanian and Croatian in official use as well.

Article 79 gives minority communities "the right to authentic representation" in parliament and in municipal assemblies "according to the principle of affirmative action", and the election law of 1998 turns that into arithmetic. Lists representing a community that makes up no more than 15% of the population, which the observers identify as the Bosniaks, Albanians, Muslims and Roma, have a lower bar. If no such list for a community clears 3%, every list that reaches 0.7% shares up to three seats on their combined vote. The leading Croat list takes a seat at 0.35%.

In practice a mainstream list needed an average of about 5,500 votes a seat in 2023, where a minority list could be seated on 3,000 votes or, for the Croats, 1,500.

In the 2020 election the Albanian Forum won 5,671 votes and the Albanian Alliance 4,520, and the two took three seats together; the Croatian Civic Initiative took one seat on 2,231 votes, 0.74%. In 2023 four lists registered as minority lists won ten seats between them, 12.3% of the chamber. The law sets no criteria for granting a list minority status, and several interlocutors told the mission that contestants used the lower threshold to reach parliament and public funding more easily. The report also recommended extending the lower threshold explicitly to the Roma community.

Why the former communists governed Montenegro so long

Montenegro held its first multi-party parliamentary election on 9 and 16 December 1990, and a presidential election on 9 and 23 December. The winner was the Democratic Party of Socialists, the Montenegrin branch of the Yugoslav communist party renamed, which inherited the old party's infrastructure, resources and membership. The party had risen with a young leadership brought to office in the late 1980s, of whom Milo Đukanović, Momir Bulatović and Svetozar Marović ran the republic in the early 1990s.

The same party governed through three constitutional arrangements: the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that Montenegro formed with Serbia in April 1992 after a referendum, the looser State Union of Serbia and Montenegro of 2003, and independence in 2006. Its leadership split in 1997, when Đukanović defeated Bulatović in a presidential run-off that the English Wikipedia history records as marked by irregularities, and from 1996 Đukanović's government separated Montenegro's economic policy from Serbia's and adopted the Deutsche Mark. The pro-independence camp in the 2006 referendum was built round the party. Đukanović held the offices of prime minister and president in turn from 1991, and won the presidency again in April 2018.

Freedom House described Montenegro as a hybrid regime in 2019, citing state capture, abuse of power and strongman tactics by Đukanović, and kept that classification in its report of May 2020. Anti-corruption protests against him and the government began in February 2019. The party campaigned as the pro-European and pro-NATO side of Montenegrin politics, and its opponents in 2020 were led by Serb parties.

The tenure ended at the parliamentary election of 2020. The Democratic Party of Socialists won 30 of the 81 seats. Three blocs won 41 between them: For the Future of Montenegro 27, Peace is Our Nation 10 and In Black and White 4. They formed a government on that majority of one, and the party that had governed since 1991 went into opposition.

How the Montenegrin government fell twice in one year

The OSCE observers described the majority of 2020 as "a broad coalition of political parties united in three different political blocks", holding 41 of the 81 seats. Its government, led by Zdravko Krivokapić of the Democratic Front, fell to a vote of no confidence in February 2022, the first successful one in the country's history.

A minority government under Dritan Abazović followed in April 2022, formed by moderate parties from both the pro-European and the pro-Serb side. It lost a vote of no confidence on 20 August 2022, 113 days after taking office.

The constitution makes a no-confidence motion easy to table and hard to repeat. It takes the signatures of 27 members, a third of the chamber, and a government that survives one may not face another from the same signatories for 90 days. A no-confidence vote needs a majority of all 81 members. A government that has lost its mandate stays in office until a new one is elected, and it may not dissolve parliament.

What Montenegro's constitution leaves unwritten

Article 92 dissolves parliament if it fails to elect a government within 90 days of the president first proposing a candidate for prime minister. It says nothing about what happens after a no-confidence vote if the president proposes nobody. In the autumn of 2022 President Đukanović declined to nominate Miodrag Lekić of the Democratic Alliance for prime minister, and because Article 92 counts its 90 days from the president's first proposal, no deadline began to run and the outgoing government stayed. On 12 December 2022 parliament amended the Law on the President so that a candidate backed by a majority of all members, established by a signed petition, would count as prime minister-designate if the president declined to act.

The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe had given its opinion three days earlier. It accepted that the constitution "would benefit from additional regulation on the formation of the government, in particular, to prevent deadlocks", and called the draft law "a pragmatic attempt to solve the institutional impasse", but held that anything touching the constitution's checks and balances belonged in a constitutional amendment, with its two-thirds majorities. The amended law was never applied.

On 16 March 2023 the president dissolved parliament and called an early election for 11 June. Forty-one members asked the Constitutional Court to suspend the decree. The court reviewed their complaint on 7 April and reached no decision, on a tied vote. The OSCE observers set out the result of the whole sequence in their report of December 2023: the elections went ahead with the constitutionality of their calling unresolved, and the constitution still did not regulate "a process in case of a vote of no-confidence". Their recommendation was to amend the constitutional provisions on calling elections, which returns the matter to a two-thirds vote.

Why Montenegro's Constitutional Court could tie

The Constitutional Court has seven judges elected for 12 years. Parliament elects them, two on the president's proposal and five on the proposal of a parliamentary committee after a public call, and it needs two-thirds of all members on the first vote and three-fifths, 49 members, on a second held at least a month later. A judge must be at least 40 years old with 15 years in the law, and is dismissed for expressing political convictions in public.

No bloc can seat a judge alone without 49 votes, and the governing majority formed in 2020 held 41, so every appointment needs votes from across the chamber and a vacancy stays open until they are found. In the spring of 2023 the court sat with six judges, because parliament had not filled the seventh place, which the observers describe as the seat for a judge representing national minorities. A court of six can divide three against three, and on the dissolution decree of 16 March 2023 it did. Three judges declined to review the decree at all, reading it as an individual act outside the court's jurisdiction.

The observers also criticised the court's procedure: it deliberates in closed session, without the parties present, and is not required to publish every complaint or decision; in 2023 it rejected two appeals over the registration of candidate lists and published only some information on the outcome. Judges of the ordinary courts, by contrast, are appointed through the Judicial Council, which parliament fills in part, and serve until the age of 67.

What the statehood question does to Montenegrin party lines

The sources describe Montenegrin parties by where they stand on Serbia, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the West. The 2006 referendum split the parties along that line and the line survived independence. The census figures of 2023 put Montenegrins and Serbs together at about three-quarters of the population with neither a majority, and every government since 2006 has been a coalition of at least three parties.

The constitution separates religious communities from the state and makes them equal. In late December 2019 parliament adopted a Law on Religion that provided for church buildings and estates built before 1918 to pass from the Serbian Orthodox Church to the Montenegrin state. Seventeen members of the opposition Democratic Front were arrested before the vote for disrupting it, and protest walks organised mostly by the church continued in most municipalities into March 2020. The parliamentary election of 2020 followed.

In June 2024 parliament adopted a resolution on the Jasenovac concentration camp of the Second World War, promoted by the pro-Serb parties and read by its critics as a reply to Montenegro's support for a United Nations resolution on the Srebrenica genocide. The Croatian government protested and warned that it could affect Montenegro's path to the European Union.

Local government is organised in 25 municipalities, each with its own assembly, and the constitution gives minority communities representation there on the same affirmative terms as in parliament. The three statistical regions, northern, central and coastal, have no administrative function.

Who Montenegro has aligned with since independence

Montenegro was admitted to the United Nations on 28 June 2006 and joined NATO on 5 June 2017, a step the English Wikipedia history of Montenegro records as rejected by about half the population. The Special Prosecutor held that a coup against the government had been prepared for the election day of 16 October 2016, and fourteen people, two Russian nationals and two Montenegrin opposition leaders among them, were indicted. In September 2022 six Russian diplomats were expelled after an espionage investigation.

European Union membership has been the focus of Montenegrin foreign policy since independence, before and after the change of government in 2020. Montenegro became a candidate in 2010 and opened negotiations in 2012. The chapter on economic and monetary policy was opened on 25 June 2018, covering a state that already uses the euro as legal tender without belonging to the euro area. The World Bank's country overview of 2026 counted all 33 negotiating chapters open and 14 provisionally closed, with membership targeted for 2028 and contingent on sustained reform; the Bank names the rule of law as the constraint that has slowed the process. In April 2026 the EU ambassadors in Brussels approved the start of preparations for Montenegro's accession agreement.

Accession itself will pass through Article 15, which leaves the manner of joining the European Union to parliament. The next sentence of the same article forbids any union that ends Montenegro's independence, and changing that sentence takes three-fifths of all the voters.