Aleksandar Martinović

Martinović received the seventy-fifth position on the Radical Party's electoral list in the 2007 Serbian parliamentary election.[2] The party won eighty-one seats, retaining its status as the largest party in the assembly but also falling well short of a majority and serving in opposition in the sitting of the assembly that followed. Martinović was selected as party of his party's delegation.[3] (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. Martinović did not automatically receive a mandate by virtue of his list position.)[4] He was promoted to the twenty-third position on the Radical list for the 2008 parliamentary election and was once again selected for the party's delegation after the list won seventy-eight seats.[5][6] The party remained in opposition during this time.

The Radical Party experienced a serious split in late 2008, with several members joining the breakaway Progressive Party under the leadership of Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić. Martinović remained with the Radicals and was given a larger role to play within the party. He strongly opposed a late 2008 draft of Vojvodina's statute, describing it as having been designed to "suppress the Serbian identity" of the province and as having "a preamble which is characteristic of a constitution of an independent state."[7] The following year, he opposed an anti-discrimination bill that offered protection to LGBTQ citizens, charging that it amounted to a "persecution of Christians."[8]

Martinović subsequently became deputy leader of the party's parliamentary group, and some journalists noted that group leader Dragan Todorović was gradually providing him with a more prominent role in the assembly.[9] He travelled to the Netherlands in late 2009 for his first meeting with Radical Party leader Vojislav Šešelj, who was then facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague; in an interview prior to the meeting, Martinović acknowledged that he had risen to the top of the party hierarchy in a relatively short period of time.[10]

Martinović was appointed as vice-president of the Radical Party in April 2010. Later in the year, he called on the government of Serbia to reject any direct negotiations with Hashim Thaçi, the prime minister of the disputed territory of Kosovo, on the grounds that it would confer legitimacy on Thaci's government.[11]

In 2011, he said that the Radical Party could not form government on its own and should join a coalition with the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Serbia, or the Socialist Party of Serbia. Todorović declined to comment on this statement.[12]

Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. Martinović received the second position on the Radical Party list, behind Šešelj, in the 2012 Serbian parliamentary election.[13] The Radicals also intended to nominate Martinović as their candidate in the 2012 Serbian presidential election, until Šešelj unexpectedly selected his wife Jadranka for the role instead.[14] Ultimately, the party failed to cross the electoral threshold to win representation in the assembly; Martinović, like all incumbent Radicals seeking re-election, was defeated. The Progressive Party and its allies won the greatest number of seats and subsequently emerged as the dominant party in a new coalition government.

Martinović, increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the Radicals, left the party to join the Progressives on July 4, 2012. He was appointed as the chair of Serbia's privatization agency and of the Galenika supervisory board in 2013 and held both positions until his return to parliament the following year.[1]

Martinović received the nineteenth position on the Progressive Party's Aleksandar Vučić — Future We Believe In list in the 2014 election and was re-elected when the list won a landslide victory with 158 out of 250 mandates.[15] He chaired the assembly committee on legislative and constitutional issues in the parliament that followed[16] and endorsed a new Vojvodina statute that affirmed both the province's autonomy and its inseparability from Serbia.[17] He was promoted to the seventh position on the Progressive list in the 2016 election and was again returned when the list won 131 mandates.[18] Martinović spoke in support of Ana Brnabić, Vučić's successor as prime minister of Serbia, in June 2017, arguing that she would continue a path of integration with the European Union while also seeking stronger connections with Russia and China.[19]

Martinović is currently the leader of the Progressive Party's parliamentary group. He is also chair of the committee on administrative, mandate, budget, and immunity issues; a member of the committee on the judiciary, public administration, and local self-government; the head of the parliamentary friendship group with Bosnia and Herzegovina; and a member of the parliamentary friendship group with Russia.[20]

On 19 July 2018, while pleading for new proposal of Law on organ transplantation, he stated during speech in National Assembly that: "Once a person dies, he (or she) is no longer owner of properties, nor his body organs".[21] His comments gained lot of negative reactions and condemnations.[21]