Maja Gojković


Maja Gojković is a Serbian politician and current President of the National Assembly of Serbia. She served as minister without portfolio and Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia under the Slobodan Milošević regime.
She previously served as Mayor of the city of Novi Sad, capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, in Serbia and a councillor in the Parliament of Novi Sad as a representative of the People's Party, previously also known as the "Grupa građana - Maja Gojković". She was one of the leaders of the United Regions of Serbia.
For having supporting a coalition with Boris Tadić and his Democratic Party independently of the People's Party, she and other such members were expelled from the URS.
The party is now defunct and she is a member of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.

Education

She attended Branko Radičević elementary school and the Gymnasium Jovan Jovanović Zmaj. After getting her degree from the University of Novi Sad Faculty of Law in 1987, she passed the bar exam in 1989. A year later she started working in her family's law firm "Gojković".

Political career

Gojković is one of the founders of Serbian Radical Party, first holding the position of secretary general, then vice president of executive council and finally she was vice president of the party. She was Vojislav Šešelj's legal adviser before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. However, she left the party in 2006 after disagreement with party leadership.
Maja Gojković has been a representative in the parliament of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia since 1992. From 1996 until 2000 she was a member of Vojvodina parliament. In 1998 and 1999 she was a non-portfolio minister in the Serbian Government. Gojković also served as vice chairman of the federal government of FR Yugoslavia in 1999. Before running for mayor of Novi Sad she held a place in the federal parliament of Serbia and Montenegro. She was the vice president of the Serbian Radical Party until 2006. In 2008, she formed her own party, "Grupa Građana - Maja Gojković" and ran for seats in the Local elections and resigned from the Serbian Radical Party. She got seven councillor seats in the Parliament of Novi Sad.
In the 2004 Serbian local election she was elected Mayor of Novi Sad, for the first time by popular vote, beating then mayor Borislav Novaković. She thus became the first woman to perform mayoral duties in Novi Sad's history.

Controversies

On 14 July 1995, during the Bosnian War, Gojković, who served as vice-president of Serbian Radical Party, made a statement on the Fall of Srebrenica only a few days after the start of the massacre: “We salute the rapidly action of the Army of Republika Srpska, which finally liberated Serbian Srebrenica and put an end to one of the most significant hotspot of Muslim terror”
She was elected President of the National Assembly of Serbia on 23 April 2014. In 2018, Freedom House reported that Gojković conducted parliamentary proceedings in an extremely partisan way, with a huge number of interruptions and penalties handed to opposition MPs. In addition, she was criticized for suggesting to MPs from ruling coalition to vote for initiatives and proposals by ringing a bell.