Radivojevic Quits SPS Posts as Paracin Chief

Andrija Radivojevic, until now president of the Municipal Board of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in Paracin, announced on Friday, September 5, that he is resigning from all his positions in the party. The news broke at 8:07 p.m., in the same week that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is expected to call early parliamentary elections for September 9 or 10.

Besides leading the Paracin municipal board, Radivojevic also sat on the Executive Board of the SPS Main Board, was a member of the Main Board itself, and held a council seat in the Paracin Municipal Assembly. By his own account, he had belonged to the party for a decade and a half, and had sat on the Main Board for nearly as long.

In the resignation statement he made public, he pointed back to his record at the head of the municipal organization:

I have been a member of the SPS for a decade and a half, and a member of the Main Board for almost as long. Throughout that time I tried to make my contribution to the party above all through work and results.

He cited a longstanding disagreement with the direction the party has taken as his reason for leaving, adding that the recent events surrounding Branko Ruzic had reinforced that decision. He also framed his point around the question of internal party democracy.

Regardless of whether I agree with his views or not, I believe a serious political party has to leave room for different opinions, including disagreement with the leadership’s positions. A decision of this political weight should, in my view, have been debated seriously at the Main Board, with Ruzic present.

Radivojevic said his resignation from party posts was not a renunciation of his socialist convictions, and that he remains true to the idea that drew him into politics in the first place.

His departure is not an isolated case but the continuation of a string that began three days earlier. On September 2, Main Board members Milutin Ruzic and Mateja Rankovic submitted irrevocable resignations from all their positions and their party membership, over the expulsion of Branko Ruzic from the SPS. That same day, SPS officials from Kursumlija, Dejan Curcic and Milan Stepanovic, left the party for the same reason, while Ivan Djokovic, deputy president of the SPS Provincial Board in Vojvodina and a Main Board member, resigned from all his posts as well. Branko Prodanovic, president of the SPS in Zubin Potok, also left the party in that same wave, arguing that the SPS had become an appendage of the Serbian Progressive Party.

The geography of these departures shows the split is not confined to one municipal branch or one part of Serbia. Kursumlija lies in the south of the country, Vojvodina in the north, Zubin Potok in Kosovo and Metohija, and now Paracin in central Serbia has joined the list. In every one of these cases, the officials gave up both their party posts and their party membership, not just one or the other.

Radivojevic’s place in the party hierarchy set his exit apart from the others. The Executive Board of the Main Board is a narrower, operational body within the SPS Main Board, so beyond his leading role in Paracin, Radivojevic also sat in that inner circle involved in running the party’s day-to-day affairs. His departure extends the list of officials who have left the SPS in recent days to nearly every level of the party structure, from the municipal to the republican.

Our newspaper recently reported on Branko Ruzic surrendering his seat in the National Assembly of Serbia, a move that preceded this string of resignations within the party.

It remains to be seen how much further the exodus will run before the elections are formally called for September 9 or 10, and how the SPS leadership will respond to these departures once the campaign itself is under way.