Jelena Žarić Kovačević

Žarić Kovačević was born in Niš, then part of the Socialist Republic of Serbia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She was raised in the city and has both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Niš Faculty of Law. She is a law professor and also worked as a lawyer until 2012, when she became deputy secretary of the City Assembly of Niš. She served in this role until March 2016, when she became president of the city's election commission, a position she held until July of the same year.[1][2] The revenue that she and other election commissioners earned subsequently became a point of controversy, although she has said that the payments simply followed past precedent.[3]

Žarić Kovačević is a member of the Progressive Party's main board and its city committee in Niš.[4] She received the 219th position (out of 250) on the party's Aleksandar Vučić — Future We Believe In electoral list for the 2014 Serbian parliamentary election; this was too low a position for election to be a realistic possibility, and indeed she was not elected despite the list winning a landslide victory with 158 mandates.[5] She was promoted to the fifty-first position on the successor Aleksandar Vučić — Serbia is winning list for the 2016 parliamentary election and was elected when the list won 131 mandates.[6]

She is currently a member of the assembly's committee on constitutional and legislative issues; a deputy member of the committee on human and minority rights and gender equality and the committee on spatial planning, transport, infrastructure, and telecommunications; a deputy member of Serbia's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean; the head of Serbia's parliamentary friendship group with the United Arab Emirates; and a member of the parliamentary friendship groups with Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.[7]