He was born in 1948 in Plavna village (Bač municipality) in Bačka, Serbia (then Yugoslavia) to a Croatian family from Ledinac near Grude in western Herzegovina.

He finished high school in Herzegovina and went to university in Zagreb, Croatia where he got a major in law.

[2] When in 2013 he became the Speaker of the Parliament he became the first Croat from Herzegovina to hold such a high position in Croatian politics.

He had already been acting as speaker during Šprem's absence due to cancer treatment in Houston, Texas.

He was proposed as the permanent Speaker of the Parliament by the ruling coalition and was confirmed on 10 October 2012, by a vote of 123 parliamentarians out of 151.