Milan Knežević (Serbian Cyrillic: Милан Кнежевић; born March 9, 1952) is a politician, academic, and medical doctor in Serbia. He has served in the National Assembly of Serbia since 2008, initially as a member of the Serbian Radical Party and since October 2008 with the Serbian Progressive Party.
Early life and private career
Knežević was born in Kragujevac, then part of the People's Republic of Serbia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Medicine in 1977 and subsequently received a master's degree (1984) and a Ph.D. (1987) from the same institution. He is a regular professor of Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine in Kragujevac and the head of the department of pathological anatomical diagnostics at the community's Clinical Centre.
Parliamentarian
Knežević first entered the National Assembly following the 2008 Serbian parliamentary election, in which he received the thirty-seventh position on the electoral list of the Serbian Radical Party. The Radicals won seventy-eight seats, and Knežević was subsequently chosen as part of the party's delegation to the assembly. (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. Knežević did not automatically receive a mandate by virtue of his position on the list, though he was selected for the party's delegation all the same.) Boris Tadić's For a European Serbia coalition formed government after the election, and the Radicals served in opposition.
The Radical Party split in late 2008, and Knežević became part of a group of twenty-one parliamentarians that formed the breakaway Serbian Progressive Party under Tomislav Nikolić's leadership.
Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. In the 2012 parliamentary election, Knežević received the fifty-fifth position on the Progressive Party's Let's Get Serbia Moving alliance list and was re-elected when the list won seventy-three mandates. The Progressive Party subsequently became the dominant party in a coalition government, and Knežević served as part of its parliamentary majority. He was re-elected in the elections of 2014 and 2016, both of which saw the Progressives their allies win majority victories.
Knežević is a member of the assembly's health and family committee; a deputy member of its committee on education, science, technological development, and the information society; the head of Serbia's parliamentary friendship group with Lithuania; and a member of its parliamentary friendship groups with Belarus, Canada, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Tunisia.
References
- MILAN KNEŽEVIĆ, Otvoreni Parlament, accessed 25 September 2017.
- Избори за народне посланике Народне скупштине одржани 11. маја 2008. године, ИЗБОРНЕ ЛИСТЕ (СРПСКА РАДИКАЛНА СТРАНКА - Др ВОЈИСЛАВ ШЕШЕЉ) Archived 2018-04-30 at the Wayback Machine, Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 17 February 2017.
- Serbia's Law on the Election of Representatives (2000) stipulated that parliamentary mandates would be awarded to electoral lists (Article 80) that crossed the electoral threshold (Article 81), that mandates would be given to candidates appearing on the relevant lists (Article 83), and that the submitters of the lists were responsible for selecting their parliamentary delegations within ten days of the final results being published (Article 84). See Law on the Election of Representatives, Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, No. 35/2000, made available via LegislationOnline, accessed 28 February 2017.
- Избори за народне посланике Народне скупштине, 6. мај 2012. године, ИЗБОРНЕ ЛИСТЕ (POKRENIMO SRBIJU - TOMISLAV NIKOLIĆ) Archived 2017-09-11 at the Wayback Machine, Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 26 January 2017.
- Knežević received the 115th position on the Progressive-led list in 2014 and the thirty-second position in 2016. The lists won 158 and 131 mandates, respectively, on these occasions. See Избори за народне посланике Народне скупштине одржани 16. и 23. марта 2014. године, ИЗБОРНЕ ЛИСТЕ (ALEKSANDAR VUČIĆ - BUDUĆNOST U KOJU VERUJEMO) Archived 2018-05-06 at the Wayback Machine, Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 26 January 2017; and Избори за народне посланике 2016. године » Изборне листе (АЛЕКСАНДАР ВУЧИЋ - СРБИЈА ПОБЕЂУЈЕ) Archived 2018-04-27 at the Wayback Machine, Republika Srbija - Republička izborna komisija, accessed 17 February 2017.
- MILAN Prof. Dr KNEZEVIC, National Assembly of Serbia, accessed 25 September 2017.