Jovan has been a pro-democracy activist since early 1990s, when he fought the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic. After the regime change in 2000, he has participated in a democratic transformation of Serbia in different capacities. Jovan decided to enter politics after he was recalled early as Ambassador to Indonesia, as a result of the political retaliation by the new government, mostly comprised of the prominent figures of the Milosevic regime.
He successfully ran for the parliamentary seat in 2016. In 2017, he became the President of the Civic Platform, a new political organization advocating for the establishment of a democratic and modern state with free market, anchored in the EU and the West, based on the rule of law and full respect of human and minority rights.
During the 2016-2020 legislature, for more than a year and a half, Jovan was the President of the Parliamentary Group of the Independent MPs. Both in that capacity, and in the capacity of the President of the Civic Platform, he has participated in all major Serbian opposition activities, including signing, along with other opposition leaders, three important opposition agreements related to free and fair election. Jovan was also a member of the Serbian Parliament’s Permanent Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent's leading international organization in the field of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Due to his consequent struggle for democratic values, Jovan was frequently attacked and threatened by the ruling majority MPs, as well as their nationalist allies in the parliament. After finishing his MP term in August 2020, he and his Civic Platform continued their political struggle for democratization within the United Opposition of Serbia, a major opposition block comprised of the political forces that boycotted the June 2020 unfree and unfair election.
The worrisome trend of an increasing number and solidification of competitive autocracies has been particularly evident in Eastern Europe. In some countries, such as Poland and Hungary, although having a limited reach, European Union instruments prevented some of the worst consequences of government autocratic policies. In other countries, such as Serbia, these instruments are lacking and are mostly related to the EU-membership perspective, which seems ever-increasingly distant.
This distant and growingly intangible perspective has created an opportunity for several global and regional geopolitical players with autocratic regimes, such as Russia, China, and Turkey, to try to fill in the widening void and increase their influence in the region. The space for such actors further widened due to the initial uncoordinated EU reaction to COVID-19. Such circumstances, paired with the Trump administration’s predominantly transactional foreign policy and tolerance for undemocratic practices around the globe, made some leaders in Eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia, believe that the winning formula for staying in power was strengthening an autocratic, Putin-like regime, along with trying to exert maximum benefit from playing major geopolitical actors (U.S., EU, Russia, and China) against each other. In such a way, Western countries have been frequently sacrificing democratic values for the sake of their geopolitical interests in the region.