Dobrivoje Budimirović (Serbian Cyrillic: Добривоје Будимировић; born 5 January 1947), commonly known as Bidža, is a retired politician in Serbia.
[3] In 2020, it was reported that he was cultivating one-and-a-half hectares of farmland, where he grew wheat, corn, and alfalfa, and was still busy with a variety of domestic and international projects.
He has said that he persuaded Milošević to marry Mirjana Marković (of whom he was significantly less fond) in a church ceremony, in order to build popular support for their union.
")[7] Budimorović first became mayor of Svilajnac following the 1989 Serbian local elections, the last to be held when Serbia was still a one-party socialist state.
He has described his mayoralty as a time of unprecedented growth for the community, pointing to the construction of the maternity hospital and the gasification of the town as being among his successes.
[10] When sanctions were imposed against Yugoslavia in the context of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Budimirović responded by legalizing the sale of smuggled cigarettes in the municipality.
)[14] The Socialists won a minority victory in 1992 and initially governed in an informal alliance with the far-right Serbian Radical Party (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS).
[15][16] The Socialists increased their seat total in this election and afterward formed a new administration with New Democracy (Nova Demokratija, ND).
In 1994, Mirjana Marković started a political party called the Yugoslav Left (Jugoslovenska Levica, JUL), which largely operated in an alliance with Milošević's SPS.
Budimirović, who opposed the alliance, personally intervened to prevent the JUL from starting a local branch in Svilajnac.
[17] There was some speculation that he would afterward be excluded as a SPS candidate in the 1997 parliamentary election, but he was ultimately given the third position on the party's coalition list in the smaller, redistributed division on Jagodina.
The DOS also won a narrow victory in Svilajnac in the concurrent 2000 Serbian local elections, and Budimirović afterward stood down as mayor.