Dragutin Kurćubić

Dragutin Kurćubić (Serbian Cyrillic: Драгутин Курћубић), nicknamed Draga and also known as Dragan Kurćubić, is a Serbian politician. He was the mayor of Nova Varoš from 1993 to 1996 and served in the Yugoslavian parliament's Chamber of Citizens from 1997 to 2000. For most of his time as an elected official, Kurćubić was a member of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO).

Kurćubić is a graduated economist.^[1]

During the 1990s, Serbian political life was dominated by the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) under the authoritarian leadership of Slobodan Milošević. For most of the decade, the SPO was one of the country's most prominent opposition parties.

The SPO joined a multi-party coalition called the Democratic Movement of Serbia (DEPOS) in 1992. In the December 1992 Serbian local elections, DEPOS won eleven seats out of twenty-seven in the Nova Varoš municipal assembly, while the SPS won nine, and the Democratic Party (DS) won four.^[2] DEPOS and the DS formed a coalition government after the election; Kurćubić was one of the DEPOS candidates elected and was chosen afterward as president of the assembly, a position that was then equivalent to mayor.^[3]

Once in power, the DEPOS–DS government changed some communist-era street names and introduced the image of Draža Mihailović to municipal buildings. In a March 1994 interview, Kurćubić denied that this was due to revanchism and said that the administration's intention was to "bring back the names of those who were responsible for this region." He also criticized Serbia's republican government for taking responsibility over the municipality's power plant, forestry industry, and electric power industry, and called for more powers to be returned to the municipality.^[4]

The municipal government experienced significant divisions later in 1994, due in part to disagreements within its constituent parties. In December 1994, Kurćubić called a special meeting of the municipal assembly to add a member of the Federation of Associations of Veterans of the People's Liberation War (SUBNOR) to a committee marking the fiftieth anniversary of Serbia's liberation from fascism. SUBNOR was associated with the former communist administration, and the appointment generated some controversy. Kurćubić said that his purpose was to ensure the committee had broad representation, but some of his putative allies in the assembly heckled him as a "commie," also using other derogatory names. He decided to leave the SPO, at which point the president of the party's local board called for his resignation as mayor. Kurćubić refused to stand down and ultimately remained in office during this time.^[5] His departure from the SPO ultimately proved to be temporary; he rejoined the party in 1995 and became the president of its board for the Zlatibor District.^[6]

The Socialist Party ultimately achieved a working majority in Nova Varoš's municipal assembly near the end of the 1993–96 term. On 22 April 1996, Kurćubić was dismissed as mayor at the SPS's initiative.^[7]

The SPO joined an alliance called Zajedno (Together) in 1996, and Kurćubić appeared in the lead position on the alliance's electoral list for the Užice division in the 1996 Yugoslavian parliamentary election.^[8] Zajedno won one seat in the division.^[9] Under normal circumstances, Kurćubić would have been awarded a mandate in the federal assembly's Chamber of Citizens soon after of the election. As it happened, however, the distribution of the Zajedno seats became a source of controversy over the following year.

Zajedno won twenty-two seats in total, but the alliance's constituent parties could not agree on the distribution of its mandates, leading to an extended standoff. According to a pre-election agreement, the SPO was supposed to receive forty-five per cent of the alliance's seats in the federal assembly, while the other parties were to share the remaining fifty-five per cent. Under Yugoslavia's electoral laws at the time, however, one-third of the mandates in each electoral division were to be assigned to candidates on successful lists in numerical order, while the remaining two-thirds were to be assigned at the discretion of the sponsoring parties or coalitions.^[10] Due to rounding, the lead candidates on all lists that won assembly representation were automatically elected. There were several electoral divisions where Zajedno won only a single seat in 1996 and other divisions where they did not win any seats; the overall distribution of mandates strongly favoured the SPO, automatically giving them more seats than provided for in the agreement. Six candidates elected from the SPO would have needed to resign in order to fulfill the agreement, a solution that the party did not accept.^[11]

By late 1997, the Zajedno alliance had broken up at the republic level. Yugoslavia's federal election commission ultimately approved eighteen of the twenty-two Zajedno mandates on 30 December 1997, and the Chamber of Citizens formally ratified the mandates the following day. Twelve of the eighteen seats were assigned to SPO candidates, Kurćubić among them.^[12] Online accounts do not clarify how much of a role he played in the assembly afterward; he was not a candidate in the 2000 Yugoslavian parliamentary election. The Socialist Party's alliance and its Montenegrin allies won the 1996 election, and the SPO members served in opposition in the parliamentary term that followed, except for the period from January to April 1999 when the party took part in a broad-based coalition government.

Kurćubić was appointed to the municipal council of Nova Varoš (i.e., the executive committee of the municipal government) in July 2012 and served for the four-year term that followed.^[13][14] Available online sources do not clarify if he was still a member of a political party at this time.