Igor Bečić

Bečić first entered the National Assembly after the 1997 Serbian parliamentary election, in which he received the second position on the Radical Party's electoral list in Vrbas, where the party won three mandates.[3] (From 1992 to 2000, Serbia's electoral law stipulated that one-third of parliamentary mandates were to be assigned to candidates from successful lists in numerical order, while the remaining two-thirds would be distributed amongst other candidates on the lists by the sponsoring parties.[4] Bečić did not automatically receive a mandate by virtue of his list position, though he was ultimately included in the Radical delegation for the area.)[5] The Socialist Party of Serbia and its allies won the election, and the Radicals served in opposition until joining a coalition government with the Socialists in 1998. Bečić served on the foreign affairs committee during this sitting of parliament.[6]

Serbia's electoral system was reformed for the 2000 election, with the entire country becoming a single electoral constituency and all parliamentary mandates being awarded to sponsoring parties rather than individual candidates.[7] Bečić received the forty-eighth position on the Radical Party list;[8] the party won twenty-three seats, and he was on this occasion not included as part of its delegation.[9] He was, however, chosen to serve in the assembly following the elections of 2003, 2007, and 2008.[10] In 2006, he became part of Serbia's standing delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, where Serbia has associate membership status.[11] The Radical Party served in opposition throughout this period.

Bečić also won the Vrbas constituency seat in the Assembly of Vojvodina in the 2004 provincial assembly election. He did not seek re-election in 2008. He was the deputy president (i.e., deputy speaker) in the municipal assembly of Vrbas from 2004 to 2008.[12]

After the 2008 election, Bečić was part of a group of twenty-one parliamentarians who left the Radical Party to form the breakaway Serbian Progressive Party, a moderate conservative group initially led by Tomislav Nikolić. Relations between the two parties were extremely tense after the split; in early 2009, Radio B92 reported that Radical Party parliamentarian Srboljub Živanović physically attacked Bečić during a sitting of the assembly.[13]

Serbia's electoral system was reformed once again in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. Bečić received the fifty-eighth position on the Progressive Party's Let's Get Serbia Moving electoral list in the 2012 parliamentary election and was re-elected when the list won seventy-three mandates.[14] He was again returned in the elections of 2014 and 2016.[15] He became a deputy speaker of the assembly after the 2014 election[16] and served in that capacity until 2016.

Bečić continued to serve in Serbia's delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly until 2014.[17] In June 2014, while serving as head of the delegation, he gave an interview in Politika in which he stressed that Serbia was militarily neutral and had no ambitions of joining NATO. He added that Kosovo and Metohija was Serbia's greatest security challenge and said that the delegation had strongly opposed the Kosovo government's proposal that the Kosovo Security Force be transformed into an army. When asked about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, he responded that the Serbian government respected the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all United Nations members but for a variety of reasons would not join in sanctions against Russia.[18]

Bečić was selected as chair of the assembly's security services control committee after the 2016 election.[19] He is also the leader of the parliamentary friendship group with Montenegro; a member of the parliamentary friendship groups with Azerbaijan, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America;[20] and the head of Serbia's delegation in the parliamentary assembly of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, a position that he has held since at least 2015. In the latter capacity, he was an international overseer for the 2015 Azerbaijan parliamentary election.[21]