Ljubomir Novaković

The League of Communists of Serbia merged with the Socialist Alliance of Working People (SSRNJ) in 1990 to create the Socialist Party of Serbia. Novaković joined the new party and was elected to its inaugural Vojvodina provincial executive board in October 1990.^[10]

He was elected to the Serbian parliament for Bačka Palanka's first division in the 1990 Serbian parliamentary election. The Socialists won a majority victory in the election, and Novaković served as a supporter of the administration.

Bačka Palanka held a strategically important location in the early period of the 1991–95 Croatian War; the municipality borders on Croatia and is very close to Vukovar, where the most significant battle from the first year of the war took place. In mid-October 1991, Novaković announced that all traffic over the bridge linking Bačka Palanka and Ilok in Croatia had been suspended. He said, "We have information that, on the Ilok side, all three overpasses [...] have been mined. Personally, I believe that the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs will not activate these mines, but I could not say that for the Guard."^[11] The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) occupied Ilok shortly thereafter, and the community was part of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) for the remainder of the war.

Several Serb refugees from Western Slavonia were temporarily housed in Bačka Palanka's sports complex during the early period of the war. In January 1992, Novaković expressed frustration with authorities in Serbia and the RSK for neglecting their fate.^[12] In March 1992, he and fellow SPS parliamentarian Ratko Ristić introduced a motion to ban the return of citizens who had left Serbia due to the war. The motion was not supported by the government and did not pass, but it received the votes of eighty assembly members.^[13][14]

Serbia adopted a system of proportional representation for national assembly elections in 1992, and Novaković appeared in the eleventh position on the SPS's electoral list for the Novi Sad constituency in the 1992 Serbian parliamentary election.^[15] The party won nine seats in the division, and he did not receive a mandate for a second term.^[16] (From 1992 to 2000, Serbia's electoral law stipulated that one-third of parliamentary mandates would be assigned to candidates from successful lists in numerical order, while the remaining two-thirds would be distributed amongst other candidates at the discretion of the sponsoring parties.^[17] It was common practice for the latter mandates to be awarded out of order. Novaković could have been chosen for a mandate despite his list position, but this did not happen.) He was, however, confirmed for new terms as mayor of Bačka Palanka following the May 1992 Serbian local elections and the December 1992 Serbian local elections.

In November 1994, he said that Bačka Palanka was housing just over six thousand refugees, many of whom would need to be settled elsewhere.^[18]

Novaković's term as mayor of Bačka Palanka ended soon after the 1996 Serbian local elections. In 1998, he testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) about Bačka Palanka's relations with Ilok during the early period of the Croatian War.^[19]

1990 Serbian parliamentary election: Bačka Palanka I

Candidate		Party	First round		Second round
			Votes	%	Votes	%
	Ljubomir Novaković	Socialist Party of Serbia		44.60		53.39
	Borislav Milošević	Serbian Renewal Movement		27.26		defeated
	Zdravko Marjanović	Union of Reform Forces of Yugoslavia for Vojvodina– Association for the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative		defeated
	Dr. Ružica Nikolić	Serbian National Renewal		defeated
	Janićije Coja Radović	People's Radical Party		defeated
Total
Source: [20][21][22][23][24] Marjanović, Nikolić, and Radović are listed alphabetically.