Later this month, Milanović will suspend his parliamentary status, but will retain the option of coming back during this Parliament.
Zoran Milanović is still the president of the SDP Parliamentary Group. This is the main surprise from the last night’s session of the group, the first since SDP elected Davor Bernardić as party president and Milanović’s successor, reports Novi List on December 1, 2016.
Although it was widely expected that Bernardić, as the new president of the largest opposition party and leader of the opposition, would immediately take over the post of president of his parliamentary group, Bernardić has still not made the final decision whether he will do it. That is the reason why Milanović is still the parliamentary club president. People close to Milanović say that he was thinking about resigning from that post, but had decided otherwise in order not to further complicate Bernardić’s position.
At last night’s meeting, the new SDP leader said that the issue would be resolved after the party conference which will take place on Saturday. Several of SDP’s MPs were surprised with Bernardić’s reservations about the possibility that he should be the leader of the party in Parliament.
When SDP or HDZ are in parliamentary opposition, their presidents are always at the same time leaders of their respective parliamentary groups. Therefore, a number of SDP MPs has been trying to persuade Bernardić to do the same. However, people around Bernardić claim that there is no need to accumulate multiple duties and that one person should not be doing everything, as it was the case during previous party presidents Milanović and Ivica Račan.
They think that Bernardić should first focus on rebuilding the party, and that some other, more experienced MPs should lead the party in Parliament. In accordance with this approach, the new party president had the idea that together with SDP’s MPs he should immediately launch a team building effort in Slavonia, but it was ultimately decided to organize a meeting of the parliamentary group first, perhaps due to the fact that SDP’s parliamentary benches are mostly empty, so there was a need to institute some kind of discipline among MPs.
Milanović will remain in Parliament until 15 December and the regular Christmas and New Year break, and then he will leave the Parliament and retire from active politics. However, he will not resign as an MPs, but just suspend his parliamentary status, which means that, if he wants, he could reactivate it later during the term.
