The constitutive session of the Budva parliament, after the November elections held on November 17 last year, is scheduled for today, where it could be hinted at whether Budva will get a stable government after four years of political turbulence and four election cycles, and whether after full eight years, the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) moved from the opposition to the ruling benches.
On the agenda is the verification of the mandate, and if the political group "Budva naš grad", which it leads Nikola Jovanovic, together with the already certain future partners from the Civic Movement URA and the European Union, proposed a high-ranking official of the SDP Petar Odžić for the president of the Municipal Assembly, and DPS supports him, the parliament would be constituted.
If this does not happen, the Budva councilors have until February 11 to elect the head of the parliament, and the deadline for the election of the president of the Municipality, whose chair is allegedly reserved for Jovanovic, is March 13.
This is one of the scenarios that has been mentioned for days, according to which Jovanović's group with GP URA and Odžić's European Union would propose a platform for the formation of the future government, for which he is seeking minority support. The only possibility is to get minority support from DPS, because the coalition "For the future of Budva - Mladen Mikijelj" is not politically acceptable for the European Union.
Even though the DPS did not advertise publicly, and formal negotiations on giving minority support have not yet taken place, by entering into such a political arrangement, that party would "by depth" take over many seats in the administration and local businesses and institutions and thus return to power.
The condition for them to provide minority support is the resignation of the current President of the Municipality Milo Božović, an interlocutor from DPS told "Vijesta".
The case of Božović, who yesterday marked two years of managing the city, will certainly be remembered as a political precedent because for 21 months he made moves and made key decisions and participated and conducted political processes from the prison cell of the Investigation Prison.
On the Šćepandan church holiday, as it was mentioned at the time, on January 9, 2023, the Municipal Assembly, with the votes of the councilors of the Democratic Front, the Civic Movement URA, the Socialist People's Party and the Democrats, elected Milo Božović as the President of the Municipality for the next four-year term. Opposition members from the SDP and the coalition gathered around the DPS were against it.
After three months, Božović was arrested by members of the Special Police Department on the charge of being part of a police drug cartel that smuggled tons of cocaine. But the fact that the cabinet in the Municipality was replaced by a prison cell did not prevent Božović from being a key figure, and that through two election cycles, even though he did not officially support the "Budva nas grad" group, he managed to keep half of the electorate from what he had in October 2022 .when he won absolute power.
At that time, he won the trust of the citizens with an ambitiously presented investment plan with 26 projects, which was supposed to revive Budva. The construction of a hospital in the Dubovica neighborhood, the promenade from the Old Town to Bečići, the European Capital of Culture, the construction of a cultural center... are just some of the projects that were not implemented by the Božović administration. In the past two years, the city experienced a decline, and the only thing that progressed was the political war of the disunited former Democratic Front.
In order for "Budva nas grad" to provide political support for the minority government, Božović will have to step down, that is, resign, halfway through his mandate, and thus enable his most loyal political comrade, Jovanović, to take his seat.
Jovanović came to Budva in March 2019 when he was the then president of the municipality Marko Bato Carevic appointed head of the cabinet. Jovanović became Tsarević's right-hand man and participated in making key decisions, including those in the summer of 2022 when Tsarević suddenly withdrew and resigned. When Tsarević went into political retirement, he appointed Milo Božović as his deputy, who, after his triumph in the elections, when Jovanović was the head of his election staff, handed over the chair of Parliament Speaker to Jovanović.
Božović's political retirement is now a condition for the government to be formed.
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