Miroslav Čučković (Serbian Cyrillic: Мирослав Чучковић; born 28 February 1979) is a politician in Serbia. He is the current manager of the City of Belgrade, a position to which he was appointed in July 2022.[1]

He was previously mayor of the Belgrade municipality of Obrenovac from 2012 to 2022. He has also served in the City Assembly of Belgrade and on the Belgrade city council (i.e., the executive branch of the city government), and he was briefly a member of the National Assembly of Serbia in 2012. Formerly with G17 Plus and the United Regions of Serbia (Ujedinjeni regioni Srbije, URS), he joined the Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska napredna stranka, SNS) in 2015.

Early life and career

Čučković was born in Belgrade, in what was then the Socialist Republic of Serbia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was raised in Obrenovac and graduated from the University of Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering. He worked for the company Kolabura Universal from 2005 to 2008.[2]

Politician

G17 Plus and the URS

Čučković was a G17 Plus candidate for both the Belgrade city assembly and the Obrenovac municipal assembly in the 2004 Serbian local elections, appearing in the twelfth position on the party's electoral list at the city level and the third position at the municipal level.[3] The party won five mandates in the city and three in the municipality; Čučković was not automatically elected to the municipal assembly under Serbia's municipal electoral law at the time and did not initially take a mandate in either body.[4] He received a seat in the city assembly on 29 November 2006 as the replacement for another party member.[5]

He appeared in the 244th position (out of 250) on the G17 Plus electoral list in the 2007 Serbian parliamentary election.[6] The list won nineteen seats, and he did not receive a mandate.[7] (From 2000 to 2011, mandates in Serbian parliamentary elections were awarded to sponsoring parties or coalitions rather than individual candidates, and it was common practice for the mandates to be assigned out of numerical order.[8] Čučković could have been awarded a mandate despite his low position on the list, which was in any event mostly alphabetical.)

G17 Plus contested the 2008 Serbian local elections in an alliance with the Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS) known as For a European Serbia. Čučković was included on the alliance's electoral list in Belgrade and was given a new mandate after the list won a plurality victory with forty-five seats out of 110.[9] The results of the election were initially inconclusive, but For a European Serbia eventually formed a new governing alliance with the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalistička partija Srbije, SPS). On 19 August 2008, Čučković resigned his seat in the assembly to take a position on the city council.[10] He remained in this role for the next four years. In 2010, G17 Plus began working with a number of regional parties under the collective name of the United Regions of Serbia.

Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that all mandates in elections held under proportional representation were awarded to candidates on successful lists in numerical order. Čučković appeared in the seventeenth position on the URS's electoral list in the 2012 Serbian parliamentary election and narrowly missed direct election when the list won sixteen mandates.[11] He also appeared in the fourth position on the coalition's list for the Belgrade city assembly and the first position on its list for the Obrenovac assembly in the concurrent 2012 Serbian local elections.[12] The party did not cross the electoral threshold at the city level, but it won twelve seats in Obrenovac and became part of a local coalition government. Čučković was chosen as mayor of the municipality in June 2012.

On 2 August 2012, Čučković became a member of the national assembly as the replacement for another URS member. He was not able to hold a dual mandate as a mayor and a parliamentarian, and he resigned from the assembly on the same day.[13]

The URS became an official political party in 2013 via a merger of its constituent member parties. It fared poorly in the 2014 Serbian parliamentary election, however, and it dissolved in 2015. In June of the same year, Čučković became a member of the Progressive Party.[14] He led the Progressives to majority victories in Obrenovac in the 2016 and 2020 local elections and was in both cases confirmed for a new term as mayor afterwards.[15][16]

He was appointed as city manager of Belgrade in July 2022, shortly after Aleksandar Šapić was chosen as the city's mayor.[17]

References

  1. ↑ "Miroslav Čučković novi gradski menadžer", Danas, 1 July 2022, accessed 17 October 2022.
  2. ↑ Председник ГО, Municipality of Obrenovac, accessed 9 September 2021.
  3. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 48 Number 24 (8 September 2004), pp. 1, 117.
  4. ↑ In the 2004 local elections, the first one-third of mandates were awarded to candidates on successful lists in numerical order. See Law on Local Elections, Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, No. 33/2002; made available via LegislationOnline, accessed 29 May 2021. For the distribution of mandates in Obrenovac, see Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 48 Number 32 (11 November 2004), p. 27.
  5. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 50 Number 24 (30 November 2006), p. 1.
  6. ↑ Избори за народне посланике Народне скупштине одржани 21. јануара и 8. фебрауара 2007. године, ИЗБОРНЕ ЛИСТЕ (Г17 плус - Млађан Динкић), Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 9 September 2021.
  7. ↑ 14 February 2007 legislature, National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, accessed 15 October 2018.
  8. ↑ Serbia's Law on the Election of Representatives (2000) stipulated that parliamentary mandates would be awarded to electoral lists (Article 80) that crossed the electoral threshold (Article 81), that mandates would be given to candidates appearing on the relevant lists (Article 83), and that the submitters of the lists were responsible for selecting their parliamentary delegations within ten days of the final results being published (Article 84). See Law on the Election of Representatives, Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, No. 35/2000, made available via LegislationOnline, accessed 28 February 2017.
  9. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 52 Number 12 (30 April 2008), p. 2; Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 52 Number 24 (15 July 2008), p. 2. He received the 106th position (out of 110) on the list. This list, too, was mostly alphabetical. For the 2008 local elections, all mandates were assigned to candidates on successful lists at the discretion of the sponsoring parties or coalitions, irrespective of numerical order. See Law on Local Elections (2007), Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, No. 129/2007); made available via LegislationOnline, accessed 29 May 2021.
  10. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 52 Number 29 (19 August 2008), pp. 1-2.
  11. ↑ Избори за народне посланике Народне скупштине, 6. маj 2012. године, ИЗБОРНЕ ЛИСТЕ (УЈЕДИЊЕНИ РЕГИОНИ СРБИЈЕ - МЛАЂАН ДИНКИЋ), Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 9 September 2021.
  12. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 56 Number 21 (25 April 2012), pp. 5, 120.
  13. ↑ 31 May 2012 legislature, National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, accessed 9 September 2021.
  14. ↑ "Predsednik opštine Obrenovac Miroslav Čučković pristupio SNS-u", Nova srpska politička misao (Source: Tanjug), 5 June 2021, accessed 9 September 2021.
  15. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 60 Number 28 (13 April 2016), p. 88.
  16. ↑ Službeni List (Grada Beograda), Volume 64 Number 72 (10 June 2020), p. 63.
  17. ↑ "Miroslav Čučković novi gradski menadžer", Danas, 1 July 2022, accessed 17 October 2022.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.