Momo Čolaković

Čolaković was born in the village of Ponikvice, near Nikšić, at the time located in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's Zeta Banovina but previously and subsequently part of Montenegro. His family moved to Vrbas in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Serbia, when Yugoslavia was reconstructed in 1945. He graduated from the Economic and Commercial School in Novi Sad and subsequently became involved in the labour movement, serving with the union of the Vrbas municipality for twenty years. From 1990 to 1998, he was president of the Council of Independent Trade Unions of Yugoslavia. An economist by profession, he also worked at the Vojvođanska banka from 1993 until his retirement in 2004.[1]

Čolaković joined the League of Communists of Yugoslavia at age seventeen and remained a member of the party until its disintegration in 1990. He was not active with any political party after this time until he became a founding member of the United Pensioners in 2005.[2]

The United Pensioners contested the 2007 Serbian parliamentary election in an alliance with the Social Democratic Party, and Čolaković received the third position on the alliance's electoral list.[3] The list did not win any parliamentary mandates.

PUPS later joined an electoral alliance led by the Socialist Party of Serbia for the 2008 parliamentary election. Čolaković was given the thirteenth position on the alliance's list and was chosen as part of the PUPS parliamentary delegation when the alliance won twenty mandates.[4] (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. Čolaković did not automatically receive a mandate by virtue of his position on the list, though in fact he was chosen as part of the PUPS delegation).)[5][6]

Serbia's electoral system was reformed in 2011, such that parliamentary mandates were awarded in numerical order to candidates on successful lists. Čolaković was re-elected to the assembly in the elections of 2012 and 2014, and again in 2016 after the United Pensioners formed a new alliance with the Serbian Progressive Party.[7]

Čolaković is a member of the parliamentary committee on finance, the state budget, and control of public spending; a member of the committee on administrative, budgetary, mandate, and community issues; a deputy member of two other committees; the head of Serbia's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean; and a member of the parliamentary friendship groups for Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, and Russia.[8]