Under his leadership, DPS began entering pre-election alliances with smaller parties under the coalition banner that had a different name ahead of each parliamentary election. The coalition was formally dissolved in Those 42 seats were then divided up three ways according to the coalition agreement: DPS received 32 seats while its coalition partners NS and SDP got 5 each.
For DPS, it meant less actual seats belonging to the party than after the previous election when they got 45 of 71 total seats alone by themselves. However, they were now ruling through a coalition, which benefited the party's image in other ways as it created a perception of openness and pluralism.
As far as SDP was concerned getting 5 seats was a remarkable success β the party entered parliament for the first time in its history and could now influence the republic's official policy, neither of which they could dream of had they entered the election alone.
From NS perspective, getting 5 seats was not a big reason for celebration since the party had a distinct voting base at the time, meaning they would've surely got more had they entered alone, but they were now in a ruling coalition, in position to influence official policy and were happy to be there as long as DPS supported the idea of a unified state with Serbia. Though never stable and cohesive, during its first year, the government formed by the "So that we live better" coalition was able to internally agree on basic matters and reach the minimum consensus.
Despite Montenegro being spared from the heaviest bombing, SDP and even fringe parts of DPS capitalized on the bombing to aggressively push the idea of an independent Montenegrin state. This political discourse, however, never made it into any of the government's official policy. Consequently, the mainstream of the ruling coalition started to openly support the idea of an independent Montenegro and this became an official government policy, all of which caused huge international outrage and outright opposition from the European Union.
