Milan Stamatović

Milan Stamatović (Serbian Cyrillic: Милан Стаматовић, ; born 24 May 1960) is a Serbian politician who has been the president of the municipality of Čajetina since 2004. He was an independent candidate in the 2017 Serbian presidential election. Since 2017, he has led the Healthy Serbia party.

Political career Early career and campaigns From 1996 to 2000, Stamatović was a member of the Democratic Movement of Serbia in opposition to Slobodan Milošević. In 2000, he joined the Democratic Party of Serbia, which he represented until 2014. In 2014, Stamatović, Nenad Popović, and others left DSS to form the Serbian People's Party. In Čajetina's municipal election in April 2016, Stamatović campaigned with the support of a DSS-PUPS-SNP coalition and was elected to his fourth mandate with 56.33% of the vote, resulting in a rare loss of the state-ruling SNS.

Municipal presidency of Čajetina In the summer of 2007, the local police chief in Čajetina resigned amidst a crisis in which the police could not regulate illegal construction in the municipality. When Stamatović planned to have dozens of illegal buildings knocked down, he received several threats. The same report asserted that Serbian criminal Sreten Jocić bought several properties in Zlatibor, and that Bosko Radonjich was the owner of a local bar called "Boss". That same year, the municipality of Čajetina reported a budget surplus of 150 million Serbian dinars. In July 2015, the Ministry of Construction, Transport, and Infrastructure accused Stamatović of obstructing a state-sponsored cadastral survey in Čajetina. Later that summer, Stamatović formed a Local Advisory for Migrations in response to the European migrant crisis, but concluded that Čajetina "could not host migrants." In a discussion with Blic, Stamatović claimed that he "totally understands the problems of migrants", Although the letter covered a wide range of issues in southwestern Serbia, the issue which prompted Stamatović to write the letter was Serbia's anti-corruption agency SBPOK (Acronym for "Služba za borbu protiv organizovanog kriminala") controlling business in Čajetina and looking into the local government's records, which were allegedly subject to various inspections beforehand. The family subsequently sued Stamatović for slander, and an appeals court ruled in the family's favor, concluding with a penalty of 300,000 dinars to Stamatović. Janković stated that the Serbian constitution prevented him from interfering in the ruling of the appeals court, but added that he was "impressed by the resilience with which the municipal president of Čajetina insists on the general interests of Zlatibor" and that he "fully supports Stamatović in this endeavor". In defiance of the government's delay of approval, Stamatović called for a public work action to construct the foundations of the gondola lift. In a radical change of legal terms, Stamtović replied to the SNS statement when he referred the gondola "the people's property".

2017 presidential campaign On 6 December 2016, Blic announced that Stamatović filed for candidacy in the 2017 Serbian presidential election. Although Stamatović was a member of the Serbian People's Party at the time of the announcement, the party did not officially endorse his bid for presidency, and so Stamatović started campaigning as an independent candidate. On March 16, 2017, Stamatović gave up his membership with the Serbian People's Party.

In a December 2016 survey by agency "Faktor Plus", Stamatović was polling at approximately 3% on the national level. However, the survey assumed that Tomislav Nikolić would run for president,

In the presidential election, Stamatović won 1.16% of the national vote. However, he had a strong regional showing, winning 61.23% of the votes in his hometown Čajetina. In Užice, he won 17.22% of the vote.

Zlatibor military camp 2018 Stamatović and Čajetina county supported and helped organized para-military camp "Omladinsko-patriotki kamp Zlatibor 2018" for children. The camp was closed after journalists wrote about it in 2018.

Political positions Decentralization In an interview with Danas in September 2014, Stamatović said that one of his fundamental disagreements with DSS was on decentralization, and argued that fiscal decentralization is key to Serbia's economic recovery. In an essay called "Together for the Airport", he argued that Western Serbia is isolated with the lack of a functioning airport, and that the region is too cut off from Belgrade and Pan-European Corridor X to attract more tourists from foreign countries. He proposed the contribution in coordination with the City of Užice and eight other municipalities who offered to contribute an annual sum to Ponikve Airport. The proposal was generally well received among Serbian pundits, although the chief editor of The New Serbian Political Thought Đorđe Vukadinović commented that it was unlikely for Aleksandar Vučić to allow such a referendum given his appeal to pro-EU voters. On the eighteenth anniversary of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Stamatović told an audience in Smederevska Palanka that Kosovo should "be freed from occupation".