The current convocation of the National Assembly is colorful as expected. There is something here, especially in the ruling coalition, and many exotic characters and phenomena get their five to fifteen minutes of fame. One man, however, is persistently trying, both behind the podium and on social networks, but he can't break out into the foreground and be the star of the day or even the week. In addition to being a member of parliament, Bakarec is also a regular columnist for Informer, but even this tabloid, pro-regime quasi-media does not manage to do anything with his literary works.
A MILLION FIVE HUNDRED SEVENTY BILLION BANK ACCOUNTS
An episode from four years ago shows how funny this man is: Nebojša Bakarec, a deputy of the Serbian Progressive Party, told TV Vesti (which is one of Pink's channels) that every day more and more new information is arriving about the foreign accounts of the leader of the Freedom and Justice Party. Dragan Đilas.
"Now we learn new things every hour. The latest information we got is that Dragan Đilas has 57 secret accounts in at least 17 countries and for now the money counter has stopped at around 28 million euros. He did not pay taxes for that in Serbia. There are Mauritius, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Moldova, Bulgaria and some others. Otherwise, the Republic Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering and the Council for the Fight against Corruption responded. The competent authorities will continue to do their work," Bakarec said. "I have no insight into what the competent authorities are doing, but as a political analyst I can say that with a simple five-minute search you can see some things. Dragan Đilas undoubtedly has an account in Mauritius. He desperately grasps for the detail that it is about Deutsche Bank, when in fact it is about its daughter company. That is why he insults and attacks journalists at his conferences", said Bakarec, emphasizing that certain domestic and foreign journalist associations should react. He also added: "In January, Đilas launched the falsehood that the previous elections were stolen, then he said that the photo with Vlad the Japanese was taken by accident, then he said that he has no accounts abroad... this sequence shows that we cannot trust that man." .
We do not know whether or not Dragan Đilas has 57 secret accounts in 17 countries, although it does not sound convincing. What we do know is that neither the Republican Administration for the Prevention of Money Laundering nor the Anti-Corruption Council have said a word publicly about this. Furthermore, it is interesting that, as Bakarec says, "the money counter stopped at 28 million euros", and Đilas has long been talking about the famous 619 million, against which 28 are trifles. In the end, Bakarec is not a political analyst but a member of parliament, so he can't change costumes and roles that easily. Or at least it shouldn't be able to.
A POET WITH STARS ON HIS HANDS
Nebojša Bakarec was born in 1963 in Osijek. He studied architecture, but as a candidate on the election list for the Belgrade City Assembly in 2018, he listed his occupation as a civil engineer. He was in the Democratic Party of Serbia for more than two decades and was a high official of that party. Before the elections in September 2000, he was the authorized representative of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia. He had the same responsibility before the December elections of the same year, as well as in 2002 in the October and repeated November elections for the president of Serbia, on behalf of the presidential candidate Vojislav Koštunica.
He was a member of the DSS in the Belgrade City Assembly and the president of the Executive Board of the Stari Grad Municipality (from 2000 to 2004), and then the deputy mayor of the municipality until 2008.
"I am one of the founders of Koštunica's DSS, back in 1992. I shared both good and bad with Koštunica and DSS for 23 years. Last year I was deleted from DSS, without explanation. Now I am the vice-president of the Independent DSS, led by Andreja Mladenović, the deputy mayor", said Bakarec in a letter to the residents of the Old Town in March 2016, and the information is available today on the Istinomer portal.
In October 2017, he confirmed that he would participate in the SNS campaign for the elections in Belgrade. He stated for "Danas" that he will be active as an ordinary member of SNS "who can contribute with his knowledge and experience". He believed that the SNS was being "satanized" in a similar way as the DSS used to be.
"Bakarec's new rhetoric is very different from the positions he publicly advocated until recently. Among other things, for Serbian political thought, he assessed that 'Vučić and Nikolić decided to fulfill what Washington and Brussels created them for - to betray Kosovo and Metohija, and for Serbia to swallow the betrayal without a problem - as their salvation', while "He usually called Vučić 'Mr. Vučić,'" reminded "Danas".
By the way, Bakarec told "Blic" that he joined SNS in order to fight against "injustice and the further satanization of that party." Considering that as a member of the DSS, I fought against the DS for a long time, which is the reason for the creation of my former party, it is natural for me to side with the progressives, who are also fighting against the DS".
After the election in March 2018, he became a member of the SNS in the Belgrade City Assembly.
At one time, he attracted public attention with statements about his songs and tattoos. His tattoos show an angel and 21 stars. As he vividly explained, "exactly because I write songs, I got the need to get a tattoo". He also explained that he tattooed his hands because he writes songs and hugs women with his hands.
With equal passion, he talked about his love for tango: "And then, when you get into that dance, you see that the eroticism is only superficial, and that the essential tango is an embrace, an exchange of energy between two people who are dancing, without any forward or backward intentions." . In 2005, Bakarec gave eight percent of his thigh skin to a boy who was injured in a fire.
In May 2018, the Press Council issued a public reprimand to the "Novi Standard" portal because of Bakarč's text, which contained a series of untruths and insults against N1 journalist Maja Sikimić.
MISSING FROM THE ASSEMBLY BENCH
Last week, MPs Zdravko Ponoš, Miloš Parandilović and Aleksandar Jovanović Ćuta were fined 10 percent of their salary, while Srđan Milivojević and Jelena Pavlović were fined with a 20 percent reduction in their basic salary. At the session, the main topic of discussion was why the member of the ruling coalition, Nebojša Bakarec, was not punished for saying to Ponoš: "One Ustasha piece of garbage!". However, these words are not in the transcript.
The opposition MPs claimed that the statements of the authorities that statements made outside the microphone are not included in the transcript, which was the justification why Bakarec was not warned at the session.
This is not the first time that because of Bakarec, parliamentary transcripts have been "adjusted". Namely, in June 2023, the Open Parliament initiative demanded that the practice of correcting official transcripts of parliamentary sessions be stopped. That statement followed after it was discovered that on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, a redacted version of the transcript of the discussion from June 22 of that year was published on the website of the National Assembly, from which it was omitted that MP Nebojša Bakarec told Zavetnik MP Zoran Zečević that is a killer.
The Open Parliament stated that they were shocked by the scandalous decision of the leadership of the National Assembly to "correct official transcripts of parliamentary sessions with lies and censorship in order to clean them of the traces of verbal violence resorted to by members of the majority". (...) "We demand an immediate end to that absolutely undemocratic, unparliamentary and unethical practice." In any functioning parliamentary democracy, those responsible for such a scandal would bear the consequences and be removed from their parliamentary positions", they stated in the announcement.
At the same time, the Beta agency announced that the Public Relations Department of the Serbian Parliament informed the parliamentary reporters that the agency's journalists working in the press room will not receive the transcript of the session during the day, but that the entire transcript will be published on the website only the next day. Steno notes arrived in the press room on paper, about an hour and a half after what was said in the hall.
The Open Parliament reminds that they pointed out the unusual delay of several days in the publication of the steno notes from June 22, which appeared on the website of the Assembly later than usual. By comparing the excerpts of the preserved copy that journalists and deputies received on June 22, and the steno notes that were published on the website of the Assembly, it was determined that there is a difference - the comment of MP Bakarec, which was in the original steno notes, has disappeared. The subsequent decision to no longer deliver parliamentary transcripts to agency journalists and MPs during the plenary session, but only the next day, indicates a serious intention to continue with this scandalous practice.
By hiding the truth about what was said in the parliament, transparency in the work of the highest body in the Republic of Serbia is most grossly undermined, which is a fundamental value that should not be called into question, the Open Parliament announced at the time: "People's deputies are often the subject of justified criticism because inappropriate behavior, hate speech, verbal violence, and even situations on the verge of physical violence turn the institution of legislative power into one of the generators of violence in society. However, we would not expect the leadership of the parliament to use falsification in order to make the truth about the work of the National Assembly appear more acceptable in official documents".
HOW ACTORS SUED HIM
Just one month later, in July 2023, a group lawsuit was filed by Svetlana Bojković, Gorica Popović, Dragan Bjelogrlić, Nikola Kojo, Sergej Trifunović, Gordan Kicić, Marko Janketić, Branislav Trifunović and Milan Maric.
Actor Nikola Kojo filed a lawsuit against Maja Gojković, then vice-president of the Assembly and Minister of Culture, also for a statement about actors.
In the Parliament of Serbia, Bakarec mentioned by name how much money the aforementioned actors received from Telekom for television series, and previously he did the same on his Twitter account, while Maja Gojković, reacting to Nikola Koja's comment regarding the SNS meeting, said, among other things , that he is "twisting the facts in order to hide and underestimate the support of the Government of Serbia and the current government to film workers, which practically did not exist until 2012".
"Enough was enough. It's high time to react to all that incitement and everyday hatred", actor Branislav Trifunović told "Vreme" at the time. "They poisoned and divided the people enough, now let's see how they will answer before the court. Of course I heard what the Prime Minister said about Bakarec's statements against the actors, but I want to believe that the court is not influenced by the authorities and will act according to the law."
And Ana Brnabić, let's recall, said that "it's completely clear that someone shouldn't address actors like that", and then she added: "We made a mistake, we're human, we make mistakes". Trifunović then said that Bakarec's statement that the state "sponsors" actors is unworthy of comment, and especially his message that "they are all free to act and will not be honored": "I have no words for such statements. Who are they addressed to and what are they for? We know what incitement achieves. That's enough. We kept quiet because we thought that their rudeness would go away on its own, but it turned out that it continued and intensified. Well, he can't".
INSTAGRAM OF SHALJIVDZI
Bakarec is also known as an attempt on social networks. First of all, an attempt at wit. He often makes amateur photo-montages in which he mocks political dissidents, as well as independent media. So once, in 2022, he tried, in accordance with the principles of his employer, the owner of "Informer", to expose the "media octopus" that, I guess, is working on his head. He arranged media logos and photos of editors-in-chief, without any clear message. He just put the pictures like that, as if the media didn't have imprints and you couldn't see who the main editors were. However, it turned out that Bakarec does not know what an imprint is, because he placed a photo of our late editor Dragoljub Žarković next to the logo of the weekly "Vreme". After Twitter users warned him, Bakarec didn't even look back.
Did he give up graphic design? It's not even that. In July 2023, Excel spreadsheets with the data of the people behind the SNS bot accounts, as many as 14.000 of them, were leaked from somewhere.
Bakarec was playing with Paint, a program that is similar to making children's collages from colorful paper. He made a montage of people eating sandwiches, with the caption: "I'm an SNS bot too." In this montage of young, smiling people eating sandwiches, photos from the campaigns of global fast food chains and "stock" photos, specially made for those who want to advertise fast food, have been stolen, so they buy the image and add their logo to it.
The photos were not of the same quality, they were not aligned, the font used to write the slogan was unoriginal and seen a hundred times. Like Bakarec himself.
