Milo Đukanović
Milo Đukanović ran Montenegro from 1991, when he became prime minister of the Yugoslav republic at twenty-nine as Milošević's protégé, to 2023, when he lost the presidential run-off to a thirty-six-year-old economist, thirty-two years in which he was prime minister four times and president twice and, in the intervals, the party's president with the government in his hand, the longest tenure of any leader in Europe. He broke with Milošević in 1997, took Montenegro out of the Serbian dinar into the Deutschmark and then the euro without asking Frankfurt. He kept it out of the Kosovo war. He led it to independence in the referendum of May 2006 by fifty-five and a half per cent, half a point over the threshold the European Union had set. Then he led it into NATO in June 2017 after a coup plot on election day in October 2016 that the courts found Russian military intelligence had organised. He led it to the front of the queue for the European Union, with the chapters opened and the euro already in use. He was born in Nikšić in 1962, studied economics at Titograd, and was a Communist youth official. He was one of the three young men of the anti-bureaucratic revolution of January 1989 that Milošević's crowds installed in place of the republic's old leadership. The other ledger was the cigarette smuggling of the 1990s through the port of Bar and across the Adriatic to Italy, for which the prosecutors of Bari investigated him for a decade until his immunity closed the case. There was the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project's naming him person of the year in 2015, the First Bank owned by his brother and rescued with public money. There were the Sveti Stefan and Porto Montenegro resorts and the Chinese highway loan of a billion dollars for forty kilometres of road, and a state in which the party had governed without interruption since 1945 under one name or another until the election of August 2020, when the Serbian Church's processions against a religious property law brought the opposition a one-seat majority. He lost the presidency in April 2023 to Milatović with forty-one per cent and conceded on the night, the first time he had lost anything. He handed the party to a successor in 2025. The country he made is in the alliance, on the euro and in the queue. The question the Union asks is whether the state can be separated from the man.
- Lived: 1962 CE – ?
- Nationality: Montenegrin
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician
