Montenegrins will vote for their president in a ballot that will challenge the incumbent veteran Milo Djukanović, who has held various top jobs in the tiny Western Balkan EU candidate country since 1991.
The date of the first presidential round was announced by parliament speaker Danijela Djurović, who explained that the constitutional deadline for formally calling the election was 19 January.
“Bearing in mind that there are major religious holidays of all three main confessions in April, we think the most appropriate date is 19 March,” she said, as quoted by Klix.ba.
If none of the candidates garners more than 50% of the vote in the first round, a run-off will be held two weeks later.
Djukanović was prime minister in four mandates, and also served as the head of state from 1998-2003.
His Democratic Party of Socialists reigned uninterrupted from the first multi-party elections in 1991 until its first electoral defeat in 2020, which brought to power an opposition coalition that imploded amid in-fighting barely two years later, leaving only a technical government in place.
Montenegro has been in political deadlock for months – ever since Prime Minister Dritan Abazović’s government failed to survive a no-confidence motion in parliament in August.
In September, President Djukanović rejected a proposed prime minister-designate and instead suggested an early dismissal of the parliament, but this has not happened yet.
(Zoran Radosavljevic | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
