Montenegro is holding early parliamentary elections on Sunday, the first polls since the defeat of the former DPS leader Milo Djukanovic in the presidential elections last April, after he was in power 30 years either as the head of state or government.

“A poll by the Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (CEDEM) last month placed the pro-European Movement Europe Now (PES) party, which also favours closer ties with Serbia, in the lead with 29.1% ahead of the parliamentary election,” Reuters reported recently.

15 slates submitted for snap elections

The PES’s Jakov Milatovic won the April presidential vote. The party’s leader, Milojko Spajic, is seen as the favourite for the new prime minister.

Milatovic and Spajic founded the populist platform Europe Now in February 2022 proposing the reduction of health contributions to increase the minimum pay from €220 to €450. Later they formed the political movement Europe Now, which supports Montenegro’s European integration.

The DPS will run in the snap elections independently without its previous partners Social-Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Democratic Union of Albanians, and also Djukanovic is no longer at the party’s helm. It seems according to some opinion polls that the DPS can count on the support of the 20% of the electorate.

The URA party of the current caretaker Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic which makes coalition with Aleksa Bacic’s Democratic Montenegro party is expected to win between 10-15% of ballots.

The pro-Russian and pro-Serbian coalition of three parties ceased to exist recently and Nebojša Medojevic’s Movement for Changes from this bloc will participate in the elections on its own.

The other two parties — the New Serb Democracy, led by Andrija Mandic, and the Democratic People’s Party, led by Milan Knezevic, will together run in the elections, and they currently enjoy the support of 10-15% of voters.

Political parties representing ethnic minorities mainly submitted individual lists.

Two political parties representing ethnic Albanians are expected to win one seat each. The ethnic Bosniaks’ representatives are set to win two seats.

The Croatian Civic Initiative’s slate is believed to stand a chance of passing the preferential election threshold of 0.3%

Approximately, 550,000 Montenegrin citizens are eligible to vote and several hundred local and international observers will monitor the voting on Sunday.

In March Djukanovic called for snap election for 11 June

After he previously dissolved the parliament after the expiry of the 90-day deadline that Prime Minister-Designate Miodrag Lekic had to form a government, in mid-March Djukanovic, who served as the president at that time, called for early elections.

“Applying Article 92 Paragraph 5, I made the decision to call an election for 11 June,” Djukanovic said at a press conference on 17 March, noting that he is convinced that the best solution to the political crisis in the country was to dissolve the parliament and call an early parliamentary election.

Lekic’s deadline to form the 44th government expired on 16 March. He informed the leaders of the parliamentary majority on Sunday that he does not have the necessary majority to form a new government because he lacks three votes from the representatives of the URA civic movement, led by caretaker Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic.