Impoverished Opposition Bastion Poses Test for Montenegro Leader

Local elections on May 20 in the tiny northern town of Pluzine, which just over 2,500 voters, are being seen as an important trial of strength both for the opposition and ruling parties in Montenegro.  

Pluzine is the only town in Montenegro where the country's ruler for several decades, Milo Djukanovic, and his party, have never won either a general or local election.

However, Djukanovic's party is hoping to change that, saying it is ready to save the town, its poor economy and stop people leaving the area due to the high unemployment rate.

The local authority "has to do more to use the town's potential and offer jobs to young people," a DPS official, Ljiljana Blagojevic, told an election debate on May 16.

Since 1998, the DPS has never won more than 30 per cent of the votes in Pluzine, failing to defeat the country's pro-Serbian opposition parties.

On April 15, Dukanovic defeated seven rivals to win the presidential race, but the results show that he lost the poll in Pluzine.

There, an opposition candidate, Mladen Bojanic, supported by pro-Russian and Serbian parties, won almost 65 per cent of the votes.

On May 17, the leader of the opposition Democrats, Aleksa Becic, noted that Pluzine had been an opposition fortress and the DPS's deepest wound for decades. "They have never won there, not even come close to winning," he said.

For more than 20 years, Pluzine has been run by the once pro-Yugoslav Socialist People's Party, SNP, formed by Momir Bulatovic - former Montenegrin president and former Yugoslav prime minister and once a close ally to the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

Before that, it was run by the Democratic Party of Socialists, the successor to the Communist Party, but that was when...

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