Who are the longest-serving heads of parties in the former Yugoslavia?

The head of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) Milo Đukanović is, without competition, the longest-serving leader of a political party in Montenegro, according to a list compiled by N1 Serbia of the longest-serving party leaders in the region.

What sets him apart from other regional party leaders is his time in power. Đukanović has been the president of the party since 1998. He was elected Prime Minister of Montenegro for the first time on February 15, 1991, on his 29th birthday, so at that time he was the youngest head of government in Europe.

After that, he was the head of the Montenegrin government six more times, and his political biography included two mandates as president of Montenegro.

As for the region, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, Vuk Drašković, has been at the head of that political party for 33 years, which is unparalleled in the territory of the former state. Drašković was elected president of SPO in 1990 and is one of only two party leaders from the first year of the renewed multi-party system that still holds the leadership baton.

In Croatia, the head of the Croatian Democratic Peasant Party (HDSS), Ivan Martan, entered the highest position in the party in 1995. The party led by Martan is active mainly at the regional level.

The politician from Čakovec, who turned 84 in October last year, was elected to the County Assembly of Međimurje County in 2021, and one of the curiosities of those elections was the fact that the age difference between Martan and the youngest candidate on the party lists amounted to - 62 years old, reports N1.

With more than thirty years of leading the party in all six states created on the territory of the former state, only the president of the Sandžak Democratic Action Party, Sulejman Ugljanin (since 1990), and the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Šešelj, can boast. The parties led by the longest-serving ex-Yu leadership trio have had no significant influence on the political scene for years, and the position of party leader has not been moved by numerous party splits and electoral failures. (SDS) Janez Janša, who has held that position since May 1993. He became known to the public at the end of the eighties, when as a journalist for the Ljubljana newspaper Mladina he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for divulging a military secret. Janša began his rich political career as the Minister of Defense in the first Slovenian government, and later served as Prime Minister on as many as three occasions. The last time he led the government was from March 2020 to June last year, when Janša's party again switched to the opposition.

In contrast to Serbia and Slovenia, the longest-serving party leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as in Croatia, are not so well known to the general public, despite having almost three decades of experience on the political scene. At the head of the Bosnian Party (BOSS) since May 1994, Tuzla lawyer Mirnes Ajanović, who was a candidate for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1996 and 2006 elections, was directly elected to the House of Representatives of the FBiH Parliament.