Adrijana Mesarović

She has been Minister of Economy since May 2024 and a Deputy Prime Minister since April 2025, serving in a caretaker capacity during the 2026 campaign. She was 16th on the list Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia, which came second in the Serbian parliamentary election of 25 October 2026.

Career

Mesarović holds a master's in economics from Novi Sad and trained in Southampton. She worked in banking from 2008, on the financial restructuring of companies and as an economic expert witness in court cases, and in 2014 joined a Novi Sad working group restructuring city utilities. Under Mayor Vučević she became assistant mayor for finance and chair of the board of the agency licensing bankruptcy administrators in 2018, and in 2020 a city councillor for the budget, finance and investment. She became Minister of Economy in Vučević's cabinet in May 2024, also ran the Ministry of Internal and Foreign Trade from November 2024 after Tomislav Momirović resigned, and kept the economy portfolio as Deputy Prime Minister in Đuro Macut's cabinet from April 2025. She chairs the board of the Development Fund. In September 2026 she helped deliver the SNS-led list's supporting signatures to the electoral commission.

Positions

As minister she has named micro, small and medium-sized businesses and infrastructure as priorities and said she wants Serbia to lead the region in foreign direct investment. She has stood by President Vučić throughout the protests: in August 2025, outside the National Assembly, she said young people had learned important lessons while "mercenary blockaders" tried to destroy the state, and promised to keep following Vučić's vision and the SNS's policy.

Controversies

In July 2026 Nova published e-mails which it said showed that in March 2022, as a Novi Sad city councillor, Mesarović passed the Chinese contractor on the Novi Sad–Subotica railway an offer from the nursery Green In for turf-laying worth about 10 million dinars, to be billed to the state as additional works; Nova noted that she is not among the suspects in the organised-crime prosecutors' investigation of that project's additional works. In August 2026 Danas, citing the portal Pištaljka, reported that a decision she signed as minister let the privatised Yugoslav River Shipping write off about 159.6 million dinars of state loans while the company put about €1.7 million into a fund majority-owned by SNS Presidency member Tatjana Vukić; the government said the write-off followed a programme open to all such debtors who repaid the other half. No charges have been reported.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · Government of Serbia · Večernje novosti · Nova · Danas · RTS

Photo: Claudio Centonze / European Union, 2026 / EC - Audiovisual Service, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)