| Zoran Zečević | |
| Birth Date: | 12 October 1956 |
| Office: | Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia |
| Termstart: | 1 August 2022 |
| Termend: | 6 February 2024 |
| Nationality: | Serbian |
| Native Name: | Зоран Зечевић |
| Party: | SSJ (until 2007) SRS (2007-c. 2008) SDS (2012) SSJ (2013-c. 2015) SSZ (c. 2016–present) |
Zoran Zečević (Serbian: Зоран Зечевић; born 12 October 1956) is a Serbian politician. He served in the Serbian parliament from 2022 to 2024 as a member of the far-right Serbian Party Oathkeepers (SSZ).
Zečević is a surgeon living in Aranđelovac.[1] In September 2022, it was reported that he was the co-owner of an illegal home for the elderly in the community, which was still operating despite a prior ban.[2]
Zečević has a long history of involvement in far-right politics in Serbia. He was a member of the presidency of the Party of Serbian Unity (SSJ) in the early 2000s. The party contested the 2003 Serbian parliamentary election as part of the For National Unity coalition, and Zečević appeared in the seventy-seventh position on its electoral list, which did not receive enough votes to cross the electoral threshold for assembly representation.[3] Zečević was later a prominent organizer for SSJ leader Borislav Pelević's campaign in the 2004 Serbian presidential election.[4]
Pelević merged the SSJ into the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) in 2007, and Zečević appeared in the thirty-ninth position on the Radical Party's list in the 2008 Serbian parliamentary election.[5] The list won seventy-eight seats, and he was not included in the party's assembly delegation.[6] (From 2000 to 2011, assembly mandates were awarded to sponsoring parties or coalitions rather than to individual candidates, and it was common practice for the mandates to be assigned out of numerical order. Zečević was not automatically elected by virtue of his list position.)[7]
Pelević left the SRS in late 2008 to join the more moderate Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Zečević also left the Radicals at around the same time, although he did not join the Progressives. He led an independent list called "Aranđelovac in Belgrade–Movement for the Development of Serbia" for the 2010 local election in Aranđelovac.[8] [9] The list did not cross the electoral threshold.[10]
Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that all mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists.[11] Somewhat improbably, Zečević appeared in the fifty-eighth position on the list of the Social Democratic Alliance (Socijaldemokratski savez, SDS), a short-lived left-wing grouping, in the 2012 parliamentary election.[12] This list, too, did not cross the electoral threshold.
Boris Pelević left the SNS in 2013 and founded the Council of Serbian Unity (SSJ) as a successor to the Party of Serbian Unity. Zečević became a vice-president of the party.[13] The new SSJ contested the 2014 parliamentary election at the head of an alliance called the Patriotic Front (which also included the Oathkeepers), and Zečević appeared in the second position on its list.[14] Once again, the list did not cross the threshold. In 2015, Zečević was the SSJ's representative at a protest event in northern Kosovska Mitrovica commemorating the anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
The SSJ became inactive after 2015, and Zečević became a member of the Oathkeepers. He appeared in the fifth position on the SSZ's list in the 2016 parliamentary election and the lead position in the 2020 parliamentary election.[15] [16] In both cases, the list fell below the threshold.
In 2021, he led a group of party members in disrupting a literary reading by Serbian author Svetislav Basara, on the grounds that Basara had written disparagingly about Desanka Maksimović, an important figure in Serbian literary history.[17]
Zečević was given the second position on the SSZ's list in the 2022 Serbian parliamentary election, behind its main spokesperson Milica Đurđević Stamenkovski, and was elected when the list won ten seats.[18] The SNS and its allies won the election, and the SSZ served in opposition for the term that followed. Zečević also appeared in the seventh position on the SSZ's list in Aranđelovac in the concurrent 2022 local elections and was not elected when the list won five seats.[19] [20]
During his assembly term, Zečević was a member of the economy committee and the health and family committee, a deputy member of the committee on the rights of the child, and a member of the parliamentary friendship groups with Bolivia and Greece.[21]
The SSZ contested the 2023 parliamentary election in an alliance with Dveri, and Zečević received the ninth position on their combined list.[22] The list did not cross the electoral threshold, and his term ended when the new assembly convened in early 2024.