Several state and party officials in Montenegro have been active in politics for more than 30 years, and among them the head of the state and the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) Milo Đukanović is leading the way.
"On his heels" are DPS MPs Duško Marković and Mevludin Nuhodžić, as well as Democratic Front (DF) Predrag Bulatović, who was once the president of the Socialist People's Party. Until 1997, they were members of the single DPS.
Đukanović was head of the government six times and president of Montenegro twice.
He began to engage in politics as a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and in early 1989, as a supporter of Slobodan Milošević's policies, he participated in the anti-bureaucratic (AB) revolution in which the then party leadership in Montenegro was replaced and he and his collaborators seized power.
He was elected prime minister for the first time on February 15, 1991, and at that time he was the youngest head of government in Europe. He was the prime minister for three consecutive terms, until 1998, when he became the president of the country, winning the election against his close associate Momir Bulatović. From 2003 to 2006, he was prime minister again, and after a two-year break, he returned to the position of prime minister in 2008. In 2018, he was elected president for the second time.
Predrag Bulatović was a deputy in the Assembly from 1992 to 1997, when he was the head of the parliamentary club of the unified DPS. After the split in the DPS and the creation of the Socialist People's Party, in 1997 he became the vice-president of the SNP, and from 2001 to 2003 he was a member of the parliament of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
He was the president of the SNP from 2001 to 2006. He advocated the inclusion of the SNP in the Democratic Front, which was rejected by the party leadership in 2012. Part of the party officials under the leadership of Predrag Bulatović and Milan Knežević then decided to independently join the DF, which led to their exclusion from the SNP.
In 2015, Bulatović's and Knežević's group was formally organized as the new Democratic People's Party of Montenegro (DNP), a member of the DF.
During the 90s, Duško Marković, the former prime minister, also held the position of deputy, as well as important party functions in the DPS.
He was a member of the Main Board, and a member of the Executive Board of the Main Board of DPS and acting director of that party.
He was a member of the DPS to the Parliament of Montenegro in the period 1997/98. in 1998, and in 2005 he became the Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs for the State Security Service, and he held that position until XNUMX.
After the National Security Agency was formed in 2005, he was appointed its first director. He was elected to this position again in 2010.
After that, he was a minister without portfolio, minister of justice, deputy prime minister for the political system, internal and external policy in the DPS governments. He was elected Prime Minister on November 28, 2016 and held that position until the end of 2020, when a new Government was elected after DPS lost power in the elections in August of that year.
Mevludin Nuhodžić was a member of parliament from 1990 to 1992, and then a minister without portfolio. He returned to the Assembly in 1998, and from 2000 to 2012 he was the director of the Property Administration. He was the Minister of the Interior from 2016 to the end of 2020.
In the Parliamentary Club of DPS there is a significant number of MPs who have been in that position or in some position in the Government for more than 20 years - Luiđ Škrelja, Branimir Gvozdenović, Halil Duković, Predrag Bošković, Predrag Sekulić...
And the leader of the New Serbian Democracy, Andrija Mandić, has been a member of parliament for more than 20 years, with shorter interruptions, and since 2003 he has been the president of the party, which was first called the Serbian People's Party (SNS). In the FRY, he held the position of Deputy Minister of Economy, and was the head of the "Srpska list" coalition, and its presidential candidate in the 2008 elections.
The New Serbian Democracy was founded in 2009 by the unification of the SNS and the People's Socialist Party of Momir Bulatović. Since 2012, he is the founder and member of the presidency of the Democratic Front. He was the DF presidential candidate in the first round of the presidential elections on March 19 this year.
The executive director of the Action for Social Justice (ASP), Ines Mrdović, assessed that the political systems in these areas have been captured by political parties in the past decades and the stage is a classic partitocracy.
"Partitocracies are the ones that gave birth to the cult of party leaders and long-lived politicians, but the longevity of their political tenure did not bring the citizens longevity of economic well-being, but on the contrary - it brought long-term poverty and the departure of hundreds of thousands of young people abroad, and according to the famous 'belly for with bread'. The most tragic of all is that the parties and related businesses, for those who remained, are now the 'masters of their destinies', because they are the ones who give them poorly paid jobs, which is why they live lives below every level of elementary economic, and therefore human dignity". said Mrdović for "Vijesti".
He believes that open lists would be a saving grace for closed partyocratic systems, because in this way individuals would be directly accountable to citizens for the fulfillment of election strategies, and party members would not be able to easily hide behind the party coat.
"If there were now open election lists in Montenegro, I believe that even 90 percent of the deputies, who are currently in the state parliament, would not be where they are, but some other people would be there," Mrdović said.
Red-black shoots last the longest
It used to be said that the Yugoslav and Serbian socialist politician Dušan Čkrebić was anything but a patriarch. In the post-socialist period, he got a counterpart - Aleksandar Vučić, who in his portfolio does not only have the first place among parliamentarians, but he makes up for that deficit with the claims of insiders that he is actually the secular leader of the SPC.
The political career of the Serbian President of the Serbian Progressive Party, Aleksandar Vučić (1969), has spanned 30 years, since 1993, when he was elected as the General Secretary of the Serbian Radical Party and a member of parliament in the Serbian Parliament. From then until today, he has practically never been without a state function, mostly electoral, parliamentary at the republican and federal (FRY) levels, prime ministerial and presidential. But that's not all, because in 1998 Mirka Marjanović became the minister of information in the government, and after the opposition parliamentary break in 2001-2012, after the victory of Tomislav Nikolić in the presidential elections and the formation of a coalition with the SPS, he became the first deputy prime minister and minister of defense, then prime minister from 2014-2017, when he became the president of Serbia. His second term starts in 2022. Since the establishment of SNS in 2008, he has been at the top of the party, which he took over from Nikolić in 2021.
His coalition partner Ivica Dačić (1966), first deputy prime minister and head of Serbian diplomacy, has a year longer official career, and significantly more political career because he became active while still studying at the Union of Communists of Serbia. From there, he "drowned" with the entire SKS into the Socialist Party of Serbia, becoming its spokesperson, and since 1992, a member of parliament. Unlike Vučić, Dacić made it to the head of the parliament, but he has many ministerial chairs in his portfolio, including the prime minister's. And a significantly shorter opposition tenure, since after the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić, he came closer to the democratic authorities, first by supporting the governments of Vojislav Koštunica from 2004, and then by joining the Government of Mirko Cvetković in 2008. Two years earlier, he formally became the president of the SPS, which he led from 2003, in the time when his political father Slobodan Milošević was in the custody of the Hague Tribunal. However, since 2008, the SPS and their coalition-resourceful leader have not been out of power, playing second fiddle, but irreplaceable.
What sets Vučić and Dačić apart from the sea of other politicians is their early entry into the arena and their durability, which has not been harmed even by sharp turns in politics. And, of course, being in power for a long time, so none of them have any other work experience other than political.
Another relatively young politician, Rasim Ljajić (1964), has an extremely long political career, from 1990, when he was elected general secretary of SDA Sandžak, to 1994, when he became president of the Sandžak Coalition, which gave rise to the Sandžak Democratic Party, which he led for years, until he founded Social Democratic Party of the same acronym. He has held state positions since 2000, after the October elections, when he became the Minister for National and Ethnic Communities in the Government of the FRY. Although many people think of him when they say the longest-serving minister, that is still not true. He became the Republic's Minister of Labor in 2008, and then – like Dacic – he left the alliance for the Democratic Party and in 2012 joined the coalition with the SNS in four subsequent governments – the first of Dacic's, then the two of Vucic's and the first of Ana Brnabić, who held the position of vice president and minister. which is "only" six years of ministry. Ana Brnabić does not enter the second (2020) and third (2022) governments, but delegates members of the SDP. However, despite his approach to Vučić, still incomprehensible to many, Ljajić does not have much to complain about, because as the most prominent minority politician from a sensitive area, he was entrusted with difficult functions, such as managing the coordination bodies for the south of Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija, and above all the National Council for Cooperation with The Hague tribunal.
On the Serbian political scene, some politicians known from the time before the most recent Balkan wars have survived for decades, and above all the godfather duo Vuk Drašković and Vojislav Šešelj, the undisputed leaders of the two once most influential opposition parties of the Serbian Renewal Movement, i.e. the Serbian Radical Party. Both Drašković, as well as Dačić and Ljajić tried various coalition alliances, so that in the end SPO settled on Vučić's list, with the fact that even before 2000 they were in an alliance with the so-called red-black coalition Milošević - Šešelj.
The former "king of the markets", and the most vocal opponent of Milošević, also tried his hand as a minister, but his SPO did not retain its strength, so now he has several deputies (on the SNS list) and a seat on the NIS Board of Directors of Danica Drašković. The latter is nonsense, since Drašković is an opponent of the alliance with Russia, which runs NIS, and a supporter of Serbia's Euro-Atlantic integration, that is, membership in the EU and NATO.
Seselj is a somewhat different story, because his truly "impressive" political career was interrupted in 2003, after the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić, by voluntarily going before the Hague Tribunal, where he will be remembered for the longest detention period. After the separation of SNS from SRS, which is political parricide as in the case of Milošević, Dačić and SPS, and his return from The Hague, Šešelj became a dark star of obscure political reality shows. In 2020 and 2022, his SRS failed to pass the three percent threshold, which is more than miserable if it is known that until the SNS attack on SRS, they were individually the strongest party.
On the Serbian political scene, there are other celebrities with such seniority, and as a rule, they come from the red-black coalition. For example, Minister Maja Gojković - known as the most flighty - Governor Jorgovanka Tabaković, who only formally froze membership in the SNS while ruling the dinar. Until last year's elections, it was also Slavica Đukić Dejanović, vice-president of the GO SPS, minister in several mandates of various coalition governments and in one - according to many the most successful - president of the parliament. Also Gordana Čomić, a lady who has been in the Democratic Party since its foundation and gambled her long parliamentary career with the ministerial chair under Vučić's direction in 2020.
If he had not resigned from the head of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina a few months ago, Nenad Čanak would also be on the list of long-lived, both party and official. The former president of Serbia and DS Boris Tadić (1958) would have received at least a ribbon, because he became a minister in 2000, but he only held the "chair" for 12 years, eight as president of Serbia. His successor Tomislav Nikolić would also be on this list if Vučić had not hijacked his party in 2012 and the presidential race in 2017.
And, at the end of this short review, the first place still belongs to the president of the Belgrade suburban municipality of Sopot Živorad Milosavljević (1956), who has been in that position since 1989; therefore, the people of Sopoć have been choosing him for 35 years, and we don't know how long, because he is still relatively young!
BiH: A country too rich - for politicians
They come to work when they want, they leave as soon as they get bored, they get paid for blatant idleness, and the ordinary world is most irritated by their companions.
It is about a team of strongmen who clear their way and (or) drive on the roads with the rotations on, breaking all the regulations. And so from mandate to mandate, irreplaceable, irreplaceable, if they last they last. How long? Given that Bosnia and Herzegovina is too rich in politicians, because we are a country with 14 governments and the same number of parliaments - not counting local self-government - we will deal with the three most prominent players and their best, best, best biographies.
The richest is undoubtedly Milorad Dodik (1959). He has a villa in Dedinje, as many as three on the estate in Bakinci, the family business combined tens of hectares of land with fruit: when journalists once asked him about a conflict of interest because the government with him at the head gave his son a three million IRB loan for growing fruit, he answered: "And what does it take for a child to take drugs?"
The US Ministry of Finance, which recognized him as a two-time conqueror of the US blacklist, was the one to refer to the companies through which he carries out (other) business. However, only those with (too) long memories know that he also has the longest political experience. He began his career as the president of the Laktaši Municipal Assembly: it was in 1986, during the former Yugoslavia, that in the first multi-party elections in BiH in 1990, he became a member of the SRBiH Assembly as a candidate of Ante Marković's Alliance of Reform Forces. During the war - watch out now! - he founded the Club of Independent Deputies, was considered to be in opposition to the later convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić, maintained good relations with Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and earned the nickname Mile Ronhill because, it was claimed, he was the most skilled in supplying the war zone with cigarettes.
Not long after Dayton (1996), he founded his own party, and as a breath of fresh wind in the Balkans - as US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it - he won power on the wings of NATO. Everything after that is a legend: his transformation from a social democrat to an autocrat, his turning his back on the West and falling in love with Putin's Russia, and his regret for the war crime(s) against which he publicly testified. Today, the SNSD (Union of Independent Social Democrats), as well as the RS entity, can easily be included in the property of a leader who promotes hatred against everything that is other and different, including non-Serbs, dissenters, journalists, the LGBTQ population and everything that smells like the West. and democracy.
Dodik's most loyal partner does not live in Banja Luka, but in a settlement in Mostar, where the course of the Radobolje river has also been changed due to the family's 2.000 square meter castle. Dragan Čović (1956), the leader of the Croatian Democratic Union of BiH, only at first glance has a significantly shorter political career than Dodik. His contemporaries also claim that as a prominent member of the SKJ before the war, he worked in the then giant of Mostar, the Soko fighter aircraft factory. Anyway, Čović has always been known as the wisest politician in Bosnia and Herzegovina: during the war, he led Soko, ordered prisoners, of course Bosniaks, to work, but he never answered.
In fact, he made excuses for signing in Cyrillic more often than for Soko, but he devoted himself to politics fully after Dayton, he became the vice-president of the HDZ in 1998 and became a member of the BiH Presidency in the 2002 general elections. In 2005, he was accused of corruption, dismissed by the decision of the OHR and elected as the leader of the HDZ. One indictment became 14 cases, the evidence disappeared, he was acquitted, and in the meantime he managed to gather all the parties with a Croatian sign under the hat of the HNS and return to the BiH Presidency in 2014. His greatest political enemy is Željko Komšić, whom he disputes that he is a Croat. . Dodiku does not dispute anything, he himself happily visited Putin, even though he is reputed to be the biggest European in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The shortest leadership tenure in this fantastic trio belongs to Bakir Izetbegović (1956), since he became the head of the SDA, the Party of Democratic Action founded by his father Alija, in 2015, after the death of Sulejman Tihić, who convincingly defeated him at the party congress in 2009. However, already a year later, Tihić nominated him for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he remained for two terms. From today's perspective, it was some other SDA, which was involved in the democratization of Bosnia and Herzegovina. societies followed the same measures in their own ranks while simultaneously building good political relations with other parties in the country. Which Izetbegović not only did not recognize as a path worth continuing, but he heartily advocated for a completely different course. Today, the SDA is the party with which only Komšić's DF wants to work, and of the foreign statesmen, Turkish President Erdogan, who in the meantime has also become the family godfather of the Izetbegović family.
In the last General Elections in 2022, Bakir Izetbegović was convincingly defeated in the race for the Presidency of the State. The fact that traditional SDA voters did not vote for him, he recently explained by their concern for BiH, which motivated them that - as he testified - the head of the family surrounds him, and the hanuma (Turkish: wife) of the DF leader. In the spectrum of justifying his own defeat, he does not go from a poetic 10 to one: They all, and I, he repeated in order to argue the flavor of the party's victory, which he attributes to his own success. His leadership of the SDA is unquestionable, as is the political career of his wife: Sebija Izetbegović is the party's front man in the Sarajevo Canton, the director of the largest health institution in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Clinical Center in Sarajevo, but she recently lost her master's degree and professorship at the Faculty of Medicine, by decision of the University Senate. in Sarajevo. The married couple Izetbegović and the established lack of examination obligations at the postgraduate study considers political persecution and retaliation of political opponents, while the latter perceive these two as the biggest ballast for the SDA itself.
The most famous local spouses share assets of every kind equally, including a villa in Poljine, Sarajevo's Beverly Hills. And one more thing: during his term, the most esdea people ended up on the black list of the USA.
Croatia: Šeks and Pupovac have been around for a long time
In these regions, we have a fairly rapid change in the composition of political elites, says political analyst Žarko Puhovski, analyzing the duration of the mandate of the president and prime minister.
Franjo Tuđman led Croatia from May 1990 until his death near the end of 1999. First, on May 30, 1990, he was elected President of the Presidency of the Republic of Croatia in the Parliament, and after the adoption of the Constitution, he won direct presidential elections in August 1992 and June 1997. In the first, he received 56,7 percent, and in the second, 61,4 percent of the votes. Stjepan Mesić was president from February 2000 to February 2010, in two mandates. Ivo Josipović served one five-year term from 2010 to 2015, as did Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović from 2015 to 2020, when she was defeated by the current president, Zoran Milanović. When it comes to Prime Ministers, Andrej Plenković has been Prime Minister since October 2016, as the head of the 14th and 15th composition of the HDZ Government. Ivo Sanader (HDZ) served in Banski dvori from 2003 to July, and Zoran Milanović (SDP) from December 2011 to January 2016.
"In that context, we have three categories of politicians. First, we have people who have been in the forefront for 20 years or more. Only Milo Đukanović, who is a truly long-lived politician, is in that category. Secondly, we have people who were politicians of the first class, and after that they are still very important as "gray eminences". The best examples of such politicians are Milan Kučan in Slovenia and Vladimir Šeks in Croatia. Kučan is still one of the three or four most important people in Slovenia, even though he has not held any office for 15 years. The third variant is politicians who held some positions, then dropped out of the game and came back. They have a long period of activity, but they were not in the foreground all the time, and in Croatia, Milorad Pupovac is objectively the longest-serving politician in the foreground. He is a minority politician, usually marginally important, but he has been at the highest level of political decision-making for 25 years and a participant in important political events in Croatia. He does not decide, nor did he decide, but he participated in decision-making, and sometimes decisions could not be made without him. He is present continuously, unlike, for example, Stjepan Mesić who was in the game, then came back and then dropped out again - says political analyst Žarko Puhovski.
Lawyer Vladimir Šeks, one of the main authors of the Constitution and numerous laws, is among the founders of the HDZ. Since 1990, he has been elected as a representative in all convocations of the Croatian Parliament, in which he has been vice-president on several occasions, and from 2003 to 2007, also president of the Parliament. In the early 90s, he was the Deputy Prime Minister for Internal Policy. Although he is not in office, he is still known as an important "shadow player", and the media has recently mentioned him in the context of the electoral law, in the tailoring of which he will allegedly play an important role again. Faculty professor Milorad Pupovac, president of the SDSS, was the founder and president of the Serbian Democratic Forum, a representative in the House of Representatives of the Croatian Parliament and in the Croatian Parliament. He has never held an executive position in the Government. At a level lower than the national one, Milan Bandić stood out, who led Zagreb almost continuously from 2000 to 2021, with the exception of the period between his resignation and victory in the 2005 elections. Among the prefects, the longest-serving is SDP's Zlatko Komadina, who has served six terms at the head of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County. "At the national level, Komadina was a minister for two months, but he quickly returned home because it was too busy for him. He is not a national politician," Puhovski points out.
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