Milan Lapčević

Lapčević is a graduate mechanical engineer based in Niš. He served on the executive board of Niš's municipal government from 2000 to 2004 and was the administrator for Serbia's Nišava District from 2004 to 2008.[1] In May 2004, he introduced an anti-corruption program focused on border crossings between Serbia and Bulgaria.[2]

In 2015–16, Lapčević led a hiking expedition through Albania and Greece to commemorate the centenary of the Serbian army's retreat through Albania during World War I.[3][4]

Lapčević received the 133rd position on the DSS's electoral list for the 2003 Serbian parliamentary election.[5] The party won fifty-three seats, and he was not included in its assembly delegation afterwards. (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.[6] Lapčević could have been chosen to serve in the assembly despite his relatively low position, though in fact he was not.) He received the 118th position on a combined DSS–New Serbia list for the 2007 parliamentary election but was once again not selected by his party to serve in the assembly.[7]

He was promoted to the forty-first position on the DSS–New Serbia list for the 2008 election[8] and, this time, was chosen to serve in his party's delegation.[9] The DSS, which had been in government before the election, moved into opposition when a new coalition government was formed under the leadership of the rival Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka).

Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. Lapčević received the nineteenth position on the DSS's list in the 2012 election and was re-elected when the list won twenty-one mandates.[10] The Serbian Progressive Party became the leading force in a new coalition government after the election, and the DSS remained in opposition. Lapčević received the sixteenth DSS list position in the 2014 election, but on this occasion the party did not cross the electoral threshold to win representation in the assembly.[11]

Lapčević became a vice-president of the DSS in 2015.[12] He subsequently took part in a delegation by DSS and Dveri members to the Republic of Crimea in October of the same year, following the disputed area's de facto joining of the Russian Federation.[13]

The DSS contested the 2016 Serbian parliamentary election on a combined list with Dveri and returned to the legislature when the combined list won thirteen mandates. Lapčević was elected for a third term after receiving the tenth position on the list.[14] The DSS continued to serve in opposition.

The DSS parliamentary group fell apart amid internal divisions in November 2016. In the aftermath of the split, Lapčević, Gorica Gajić, and Dejan Šulkić were the only assembly members remaining with the party; as four members are needed to form a parliamentary group, they sat in parliament as independents.[15] Lapčević left the DSS on April 11, 2018, to sit as an independent member.[16]

Lapčević is currently the deputy chair of the parliamentary committee on finance, state budget, and control of public spending; a deputy member of two other committees; a deputy member of Serbia's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA); and a member of the parliamentary friendship groups with Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Italy, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Switzerland.[17]