Aleksandar Šešelj

A law student at the University of Belgrade, he sat in the National Assembly from 2017 to 2020 and in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe until 2021. He was 37th on the list Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia, which came second in the Serbian parliamentary election of 25 October 2026.

Career

Born in Belgrade, Šešelj first stood for the SRS in the Zemun local election of 2013 and the parliamentary election of 2014, both times without the party crossing the threshold. In 2016 he led its list in Zemun and joined the municipal council after the Radicals entered a coalition there with the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). He took a seat in the National Assembly in September 2017 as a replacement for Milovan Bojić, sat on the health and European integration committees and joined Serbia's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where he was briefly a vice-chair of the Free Democrats Group in 2019. He lost his seat when the SRS fell below the threshold in 2020, and was third on its list in 2022 and 2023, when it again fell short. Elected to the Zemun assembly on the SNS-led list in 2024, he resigned the seat the day it convened. In September 2026 the SRS put its candidates on the SNS-led list; opposition leader Dragan Đilas noted that Šešelj was 37th on it.

Positions

Šešelj opposes Serbian membership of the European Union, a stance he said in April 2026 the SRS had been the first party to take, and argued in 2022 against sanctions on Russia. He visited Crimea in 2017 for the third anniversary of its annexation by Russia, and in November 2024 Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov awarded him the Order for Contribution to the Strengthening of Peace. At the Council of Europe in 2018 he asked Croatia's foreign minister when Croatia would return the Republic of Serb Krajina to the Serbs who fled in 1995. He calls the protest movement "blockaders" and said in February 2026 that ordinary people had turned away from it once violence began. After meeting President Vučić in April 2026 he called for early elections and said people in leading posts in the judiciary and education, "starting with" Rector Vladan Đokić of the University of Belgrade, had shown loyalty to foreign centres of power. The SRS backed Vučić for prime minister in 2026; Đilas said the alliance showed that Vučić had given up on Europe.

Controversies

In March 2017 Ukraine's Security Service banned him and other Serbian visitors to Crimea from entering for five years, saying they had been there illegally. Šešelj answered that it would have been a shame had no sanctions been imposed.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · N1 · N1 · N1 · N1 · Večernje novosti

Photo: Nasa Televizija, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)