Nikola Selaković

Since February 2026 he has been on trial in the General Staff building case and denies the charges. He was 7th on the list Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia, which came second in the Serbian parliamentary election of 25 October 2026.

Career

Born in Titovo Užice, Selaković graduated in law in Belgrade and worked as an assistant at the Faculty of Law. He joined the Serbian Radical Party in 2001 and the SNS at its founding in 2008, where he sits on the executive board and heads the legal council. He was minister of justice and public administration from 2012 and minister of justice until 2016 under Ivica Dačić and Aleksandar Vučić, secretary-general of the President's office from 2017 to 2020, foreign minister from 2020 to 2022 and minister of labour, employment, veteran and social affairs from 2022 to 2024, before becoming minister of culture on 2 May 2024. As justice minister he visited Serbs held by the Hague tribunal, among them Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. As foreign minister he warned in 2020 that Serbs were still discriminated against in Croatia.

Controversies

In December 2025 the Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime charged Selaković, a ministry secretary and two heritage-institute directors with abuse of office and forgery over the 2024 removal of protected status from the General Staff complex, bombed by NATO in 1999, to clear the way for a project linked to Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, which withdrew that day. Prosecutors seek three years in prison for him. The trial opened on 4 February 2026, BIRN noting he was the first sitting minister tried in 25 years; all defendants pleaded not guilty. Selaković calls the case politically motivated and said on Informer TV it would mark the end of an 'organised criminal group' around the prosecutor's office; Vučić said in December 2025 he would pardon the accused. The case was still before the court in September 2026, when a heritage conservator was due to testify as a witness on 21 September.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · RTV (Radio-Television of Vojvodina) · Balkan Insight (BIRN) · Radio Free Europe · Vreme · Vreme

Photo: Press Service of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)