Author: Reform Monitor

The Montenegrin Government presented its fourth semi-annual report on the implementation of the Reform Agenda as an unquestionable success: “As many as 34 [out of 41] reforms have been fulfilled, which will bring 97 million euros to Montenegro,” it was stated. Nowhere in official addresses or media reports was it emphasized that this is a self-assessment of the Government’s success, which the European Commission has so far cut in half three times through its reviews of the actual state of affairs.

The Reform Agenda is a list of 130 reforms, each with a due date and an amount of money it carries. Every six months, the Government reports on what has been done, and the European Commission decides how much of that is truly “earned” and pays out money as a reward for the measures that were implemented.

When one takes even a casual look at how the Government reported to the EC, it is clear that there is a significant delay in the implementation of reforms and that there is no chance that, this time either, the EC will recognize everything we reported as fulfilled. There are no problems, no failures — everything is marked as fulfilled or partially fulfilled. The Government goes so far to present success where there is none, as to use the label “partially fulfilled”, despite regulations that do not allow that label to be used in reporting for these measures at all.

For example, in the report, the Government says that the work regarding amending the Constitution is finished, and the step fulfilled, and it requests 4.6 million from the EC, which is the reward for that task. The official deadline expired a year ago, and in June the grace period expired as well. When the period for which the report was written expired, the Constitution was not amended, amendments were not even written, and public discussion about them had not even begun. By the way, this is the third time the Government reports that this step is fulfilled, and both previous times, the EC concluded in its statements simply “Not achieved” — and did not pay us the requested money.

A similar pattern repeats at the step related to electoral legislation and the implementation of ODIHR recommendations (worth 3.4 million). This step was also “fulfilled” for the Government, even though not one of the four required laws was adopted, except that compliance tables and one draft law were sent to the European Commission for review.

Amendments to the Law on the Election of the President of Montenegro, worth 2.3 million euros, were also reported as completed work — the law at that time was not even sent into parliamentary procedure, was not considered in committees, and was not adopted in the Parliament.

Integration of the electricity market was self-assessed as “fulfilled”, although confirmation from the Energy Community is still awaited. The new IT platform for visas was self-assessed as “fulfilled” — although it is only in the phase of preparing tender documentation. The Government is convinced that measures were implemented even where it admits itself that the numbers are not good, like the one about providing a comprehensive out-of-cell activity regime for detainees (the number of employed persons deprived of liberty fell from 300 (2023) to 250 (2025), the number of participants in sports activities from 42 to 22).

This is a continuation of the practice of inflated statistics in Government reports and giving obviously inaccurate ratings. In the first report from March 2025, the EC rejected a third of the steps the Government reported as fulfilled; in the second, from July 2025, even over 70%; in the third, from January this year, the EC officially established that more than half of the measures (55%) were falsely presented as fulfilled. That can also be seen through payments from the EU — had we implemented everything we should have, we would have received 135.5 million by now, and we received 67, slightly less than half.

At the same time, for the first time, we can permanently lose funds intended for us because the deadline for implementing reforms has expired. Of the 41 measures for which the Government has now reported, two-thirds are reforms whose deadline expired long ago, for some as far back as December 2024. Certain reform measures have been traveling through reports for two years already; the Government unsuccessfully tries to “sell” them as implemented, but the EC does not recognize them.

It sounds technical and complex, but it is important — this will be the foundation of our financing after we enter the EU. In the financial package for Montenegro’s EU accession that was adopted in June, the European Commission stated that all member states, in the next seven-year EU budget, will receive money through “plans based on results… with payments linked to the fulfillment of agreed steps”, which is the same principle as the Reform Agenda. The system we are building now, with 383.5 million euros at stake, will tomorrow be applied to a package worth 3.2 billion euros.

Inaccurate reporting is the consequence of a lack of capacity to implement reforms, insufficient commitment of competent institutions to carry out activities that they proposed themselves within defined deadlines, and insufficient political will to achieve results and coordinate the work of the administration toward true changes.

If it is already known that Brussels cannot be tricked, then it turns out that the purpose of the report is for domestic needs — to sell success to the citizens by painting statistics and in the hope that they won’t follow when, in roughly 90 days, the European Commission publishes how much of the announced 97 million it will actually pay us.

In a system in which the EU rewards us with money for implementing reforms, the Government’s inflated assessments and beautifying of reality only waste time and money, while we suffer the consequences of a dysfunctional administration that changes sluggishly and reluctantly. We must eradicate the habit of painting over results while the stakes are “only” tens of millions of euros, both because of the money and because of the dignity of the citizens for whom those reports are written and reforms implemented.

This op-ed was originally published in Montenegrin

Author: Marko Sošić, Institute Alternativa, Montenegro

Image: gov.me