Nemanja Šarović
Nemanja Šarović (; born 28 December 1974) is a Serbian politician. He served several terms in the National Assembly of Serbia as a member of the far-right Serbian Radical Party ("Srpska radikalna stranka", SRS) before resigning from the party in July 2020. He is now the president of the Love, Faith, Hope ("Ljubav, vera, nada", LJVN) political movement. Early life and career. Šarović was born in Belgrade, in what was then the Socialist Republic of Serbia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, apprenticed in a law office , and worked for two and a half years in Belgrade's first municipal court before entering politics. Politician. 2000–2012. Šarović ran as a SRS candidate in the 2000 Yugoslavian parliamentary election, appearing in the lead position on the party's electoral list for the Chamber of Citizens in the Belgrade division of Palilula. The party did not win any seats in the division. He also ran for both the City Assembly of Belgrade and the Stari Grad municipal assembly in the concurrent 2000 Serbian local elections and was not elected on either level. He received the eighty-first position on  the Radical Party's list for the 2000 Serbian parliamentary election, held later in the year, in which the entire country was counted as a single electoral constituency. The party won twenty-three seats, and he was not given a mandate. (From 2000 to 2011, Serbian parliamentary mandates were awarded to sponsoring parties or coalitions rather than to individual candidates, and it was common practice for mandates to be awarded out of numerical order. Šarović could have been awarded a mandate notwithstanding his position on the list, though in fact he was not.) During this period, he served as leader  of the Radical Party's organization in Stari Grad. Šarović was given the eighty-fifth position on the Radical Party's list in the 2003 Serbian parliamentary election, in which the party won eighty-two seats. He was not initially included in its assembly delegation but received a mandate on 12 February 2004 as the replacement for another member who had resigned. Despite winning more seats than any other party in the 2003 election, the Radicals fell well short of a majority and ultimately served in opposition. During this term, Šarović served on the legislative committee and the committee on  justice and administration. He led the Radical Party's list in Stari Grad for the 2004 Serbian local elections and was elected when the list won nine out of fifty-six seats. The Democratic Party ("Demokratska stranka", DS) won the election, and the Radicals served in opposition on this level as well. It was reported in 2005 that Šarović had claimed 1.639.088 dinars for travel expenses between Belgrade and Vranje in the south of Serbia, where he also worked as an organizer on behalf of the SRS. In a 2006 interview with the Mexican newspaper "Reforma", he said that the  Radical Party was not against Serbia joining the European Union, but that it was not willing to take this step at the price of Serbia giving up its sovereignty over Kosovo. During the course of the same interview, he said that he had been arrested three times since the fall of Slobodan Milošević's government in 2000. Šarović received the twenty-first position on the Radical Party's list in the 2007 parliamentary election and was again selected for its assembly delegation. The party once again won more seats than any other party, fell short of a majority, and served  in opposition. For the 2008 parliamentary election, Šarović was given the tenth position on the Radical list. The party won seventy-eight seats. He also appeared on the SRS lists for the Belgrade and Stari Grad assemblies in the concurrent local elections. The election results were inconclusive at both the republic and city levels, and negotiations subsequently took place for coalition governments that would have comprised the Radical Party, the Democratic Party of Serbia ("Demokratska stranka Srbije", DSS), and the Socialist Party of Serbia ("Socijalistička partija Srbije", SPS). Šarović was not initially selected for another term in the national assembly  but instead chose to focus on coalition talks for the new city government in Belgrade. It was rumoured that he would have become city manager had these discussions been successful. Ultimately, however, they were not: the Socialists broke with the SRS and DSS and instead formed coalitions at both levels with the "For a European Serbia" alliance led by the DS. The Radicals remained in opposition. Šarović did not initially take an assembly mandate at any level of government. In July 2008, Šarović led a march in Belgrade's Vozdovac municipality against the recent arrest of former Bosnian Serb political  leader Radovan Karadžić. The Radical Party experienced a serious split in late 2008, with several members joining the more moderate Serbian Progressive Party ("Srpska napredna stranka", SNS) under the leadership of Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić. Šarović remained with the Radicals and was a vocal critic of the new party. He was given a mandate in the Belgrade city assembly on 16 September 2008 and replaced Vučić as party whip. He later returned to the National Assembly on 28 December 2009 as the replacement for another SRS member. Following the arrest of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić in  2011, Šarović described the victims of the Srebrenica massacre as "casualties of war" and that said he believed in Mladić's innocence. He was quoted as saying, "Those who died in Srebrenica were only those who did not lower their weapons and continued to fight. War is war and these things happen." During this period, Šarović also served as an adviser to Radical Party leader Vojislav Šešelj, who was then facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands. On one occasion, the tribunal forbade Šešelj from meeting with Šarović, on  the grounds that Šešelj was using such meetings to illicitly send out political directives. Šarović married Aleksandra Ilić of the New Serbia party in 2011. They divorced in 2013, in part due to political differences. 2012–present. Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. Šarović received the fourth position on the Radical Party's list in the 2012 parliamentary election, in which the party failed to cross the electoral threshold to win representation in the assembly. He was promoted to the second position in the  2014 election, in which the party once again failed to win representation. He also led the SRS's lists for the Belgrade city assembly and the Stari Grad municipal assembly in the 2012 Serbian local elections and appeared second on the party's list in the 2014 Belgrade City Assembly election; in each instance, the party missed crossing the electoral threshold. In 2013, Šarović took part in protests against the negotiations between the governments of Serbia and Kosovo that ultimately led to the Brussels Agreement. During one protest, he accused Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić of treason for normalizing relations with  Kosovo. After the conclusion of the agreement, deputy prime minister Aleksandar Vučić remarked that Šarović had sent him several threatening messages from his personal phone. SRS leader Vojislav Šešelj was allowed to return to Serbia for health reasons in 2014 while his trial was still in progress. Šarović subsequently indicated that Šešelj would not return to The Hague voluntarily. The Radicals returned to parliament in the 2016 election, winning twenty-two mandates. Šarović, who once again received the second position on the party's list (after Šešelj), was elected to a fourth term. Following the election, Šarović and Nataša Jovanović  represented the Radical Party in "pro forma" discussions with president Tomislav Nikolić on the formation of a new government. The results of these talks were a foregone conclusion as the Progressives and their allies commanded a majority of seats in parliament. The Radical delegation used their consultation session to demand that Nikolić resign, and the meeting was reported to have ended after thirty seconds. Later in 2016, Šarović was convicted of burning a flag of the United States of America and issued a suspended sentence. In 2018, Šešelj was convicted "in absentia" of inciting war crimes with nationalist speeches in  1992. He was issued a ten-year sentence but was not required to serve any time in prison as he had already spent more than ten years in custody at The Hague. Some parliamentarians called for Šešelj to be expelled from the assembly as a result of his conviction; Šarović argued that there were no grounds for doing this. During the 2016–20 parliament, Šarović was a member of the assembly's health and family committee and its committee on administrative, budgetary, mandate, and immunity issues; a deputy member of the committee on constitutional and legislative issues, the committee on the  diaspora and Serbs in the region, and the committee on Kosovo-Metohija; a deputy member of Serbia's delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (where Serbia has observer status); and a member of the parliamentary friendship groups with China, Greece, Russia, and Venezuela. Šarović received the seventh position on the SRS's list in the 2020 Serbian parliamentary election, in which the Radicals once again fell below the electoral threshold. He resigned from the party shortly thereafter, on 16 July 2020, citing fundamental disagreements with Šešelj on both the party's direction and the political situation in Serbia. He later  accused Šešelj of being insufficiently critical of Serbia's Progressive-led administration and rejected suggestions that he himself would join the Progressive Party. In September 2020, Šarović launched the Love, Faith, Hope political movement. He said that the name was chosen to reflect what he described as "universal Christian virtues, which we need as a society, people and state, and from which we as a society have moved away," and said that the movement wanted "a state where the law applies to everyone." He indicated that he considered Aleksandar Vučić as the movement's primary political enemy. Šarović argued in  September 2021 that the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of American forces showed that it was "disastrous" for countries to become aligned with the United States of America. In comparison, he credited Russia with sustaining Bashar al-Assad's government and thereby defeating Islamic State in Syria.