Kursumlija: SPS Officials Quit Party Over Ruzic Expulsion

Dejan Curcic, a member of the Main Board of the Socialist Party of Serbia, and Milan Stepanovic, president of the SPS Municipal Board in Kursumlija, have left the party. They tied their decision directly to the expulsion of Branko Ruzic from SPS membership on August 31, and issued a joint statement announcing their departure on September 1.

In the statement, Curcic and Stepanovic note that they had spent more than twenty years in SPS and had never belonged to any other party during their entire political engagement. That record, they say, is precisely why their departure should not be dismissed lightly, but read instead as a reaction to the direction they believe the party has taken since Ruzic’s expulsion.

The two men argue that by expelling Ruzic, SPS took a step that pushed it further away from its own program and ideology, and that the leadership’s decision does not reflect the mood of either the membership or the party’s voters.

“It is completely clear that his expulsion from SPS membership does not reflect the will of SPS members, let alone SPS voters, who saw in his work, proposals and public appearances a chance for SPS to return to its original principles and program. It is also completely clear that Branko Ruzic’s expulsion from SPS serves only the interests of an alienated minority within SPS, one that has become politically and ideologically completely lost, and which, through its own conduct and the party discipline it displays but which Branko Ruzic allegedly lacked, has brought SPS to the edge of the electoral threshold,” Curcic and Stepanovic wrote in explaining their decision to leave.

The two former officials devoted a separate part of their statement to the resignation Ruzic had submitted earlier, which they believe was held against him within the party, even though, in their view, it was a step any moral person would have taken in the same situation.

“Branko Ruzic cannot be forgiven for submitting a resignation when any other moral person would have felt the same need to do so,” Curcic and Stepanovic said.

They add that Ruzic, in their assessment, wanted a clearer political future for SPS, and that in doing so he was really seeking a better future not just for the party but for the citizens of Serbia. From that, they draw the conclusion that staying in SPS no longer makes sense for them, since, as they put it, their political commitment was never tied exclusively to membership in one particular party.

“We did not become socialists because we once became SPS members. We became SPS members because, as human beings, we are committed to the idea of social justice. Since SPS no longer has any common ground with the idea of social justice, and since it has, through the expulsion of Branko Ruzic, the last fighter for returning SPS to its original Program, officially sealed the betrayal of its own ideology, leaving the party is, for us, a moral act,” Curcic and Stepanovic said.

The two officials stress that their departure is not the result of any arrangement to move to another political organization, but stems solely from disagreement with the direction SPS has taken. They have not said whether they intend to engage politically elsewhere or step away from party life altogether.

Srpske vesti reported on September 1 on Ruzic’s expulsion from SPS, a decision made unanimously by the party leadership, as well as on the fact that his parliamentary mandate was subsequently restored. The case of Curcic and Stepanovic is the first publicly announced consequence of that decision on the ground, within a municipal board in Kursumlija, and raises the question of whether similar departures will follow in other local SPS boards in the days ahead.