Montenegro's veteran political leader Milo Djukanovic was set to resign as the leader of his party on Thursday, a party official said, just days after suffering a landslide loss in a presidential runoff.
Djukanovic has been a political mainstay in Montenegro for decades, rotating through various positions -- including multiple stints as both president and prime minister, and led his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) party since 1997.
According to a senior DPS official who asked not to be named, Djukanovic has "decided to step aside from the position of party president" following the double-digit loss to the upstart economist Jakov Milatovic over the weekend.
The 61-year-old will submit his official resignation during Thursday's meeting of the party's main board.
According to the election's official results published Thursday, Milatovic secured nearly 59 percent of the vote in the runoff.
Often described as a "political chameleon", Djukanovic has been a key political figure in the tiny Balkan nation since 1991, when he was installed as prime minister and backed by his ally at the time, former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
Djukanovic later broke with Serbia and turned staunchly pro-Western, overseeing Montenegro's 2006 declaration of independence from Belgrade along with kickstarting accession talks with the European Union and joining NATO in 2017.
However, Djukanovic and the DPS have seen their power dim in recent years amid widespread accusations of corruption and fostering links with organised crime, which he repeatedly denied.
The party suffered its first major defeat in the 2020 parliamentary elections, where it failed to win the majority in the legislature.
Since then, Montenegro has stumbled from crisis to crisis that has seen the collapse of two governments.
Sunday's defeat bodes poorly for the DPS ahead of snap parliamentary elections scheduled for June 11.
