The announcement of Milo Đukanović's resignation from the position of president of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) is a good marketing message, but it is a little late, after 33 years it is hard for people to believe him, said Cvijetin Milivojević, a political analyst from Belgrade.
He told "Vijesti" that he sees Đukanović's statement as one of the important final messages to the voters before the elections.
"He actually says - if you vote for me, you will have a president who will not be the president of a political party, he will not be subjective, he will not support one political party, but you will finally get a president of all citizens. It is a good message that he is different from all the others, because nobody none of his opponents said that he was going to leave a position at the top of the party," said Milivojević.
The current president of the state and DPS, Milo Đukanović, said today at a press conference that DPS will get a new leader this year.
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"You know that for the year 2023, two or three months after the end of the presidential and parliamentary elections, elections will be organized in the DPS, immediate, where the members of the party will declare themselves about its new leadership. What I can tell you with certainty I am saying that DPS will get a new president through these elections," said Đukanović.
He said that after the last parliamentary elections, he wanted to retire from the top of the DPS "with the generation that worked with him for 15-20 years in the party and the state", but that the assessment at the Congress of that party was that it was due to a change of generations it is necessary for him to remain at the head of the DPS for another time, "so that the transition can be done properly".
Milivojević says that Đukanović likes him because of his explanation that he wanted to retire even after the last parliamentary elections, but he couldn't, the top of the party convinced him.
He believes that this is the same vocabulary used by the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić and his team.
"Whenever Vučić announces his resignation from the post of party president, a campaign immediately starts - please don't go, if you leave the post of party president, the party will collapse, Serbia will fall, etc., and what Đukanović is saying today reminded me of that," Milivojević said. .
He believes that this is a good message for people who want to have a president who is the president of all citizens, and who is not politically or party-minded as Đukanović was in all three of his presidential mandates.
Đukanović retired from the highest state positions three times, for two years each, but he never left the head of the DPS, where he has been since 1998.
Đukanović recently, while DPS had not yet chosen a candidate for president, said that he has been in the political life of Montenegro for 30 years, and that someone who has been working in one job for three decades has the right to "feel tired and has the right to reason that maybe it would be better for society if there was a new candidate".
Milivojević reminds that Đukanović's "first political mentor" Slobodan Milošević, after the first elections in Serbia in 1990 and his victory in the presidential elections, formally withdrew from the position of party president and was not formally president of the party for almost a year and a half because the Constitution of Serbia required it.
"But Vučić is starting his second presidential term, and the Constitution of Serbia says again that the president of the state cannot hold another public office, he cannot be the president of the party, because the president of the Republic is the president of all citizens, so not only those who vote for him and his the party."
According to Milivojević, in Serbia, one such message decided the elections in 2012, when Boris Tadić, the then president of Serbia, and Tomislav Nikolić, president of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) were in the second election round.
"Before the second round of the election, it was Aleksandar Vučić who was Nikolić's campaign manager who came up with a slogan that read: 'President of all citizens, not the party'. This made a part of the voters vote for Nikolić, even though Tadić had more in the first round votes, to vote for Nikolić. Nikolić immediately fulfilled that promise, as soon as he was elected he resigned from the position of SNS president and handed the party over to Vučić, who became SNS president. Even Nikolić withdrew from the party, which "It didn't occur to Vučić when he was elected president for the first time in 2017," said Milivojević.
When asked what the eventual withdrawal of Đukanović will mean for the DPS, Milivojević answers that the DPS is a smaller party than the SNS, but there is a great similarity there.
"DPS is a party whose ideology is Milo Đukanović. That it is a party of the left is a story that was spent 20 years ago. The only ideology of the people who are his electorate is Milo Đukanović as such - in one phase a great nationalist, and in the next phase a fierce Montenegrin nationalist, in the third phase can be I don't know what".
As he added, in that sense it would be a big blow for DPS, but it depends on how Đukanović will fare in the presidential elections.
"An eventual victory would mean that the party would gain air in the parliamentary elections as well, so what he does next year when he steps down as party chairman will not matter much then. At the moment all his forces are focused on trying to to win the elections, because that would actually mean that that party also has a chance to make some kind of result in the parliamentary elections. If Djukanović doesn't do it now, then that party can easily go down the drain. It won't die out, but it won't be dominant Milivojević concluded.
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