Novi Sad – Target of Regime Retaliation

By catering to the wishes of Aleksandar Vučić, the authorities in Novi Sad and Vojvodina have launched a punitive campaign against educational and cultural institutions. The intention is clear: to reduce Novi Sad and Vojvodina to a cultural colony of the SNS.

The latest example, the confiscation of space from the Academy of Arts, is not an administrative decision but political revenge. When you take away the space essential for teaching, exhibitions, and meeting accreditation requirements from an arts higher education institution, you are knowingly endangering its survival. We have every reason to suspect that the real intention is to shut it down.

The case of Jovina Gymnasium shows the same logic. Students and teachers have been kept out of their school for months under the false pretext of safety concerns.

We have seen the same retaliatory pattern toward Sterijino Pozorje, EXIT, and the Shakespeare Festival. The drastically reduced budgets of the Province and the city are being redirected away from projects that represent the peak of Vojvodina’s cultural distinctiveness and instead toward projects marked by SNS loyalty. This is a deliberate policy of suffocating what in Novi Sad and Vojvodina has reputation, audience, and the spirit of the European cultural space.

Novi Sad, a city that has paid the highest price for regime corruption, a city of resistance, is now the target of regime revenge. Physical violence was not enough for the regime. Now it seeks to strip the city of its own culture, quality education, and a free university—everything that resisted must be suppressed and turned into a colonial political outpost.

Solidarity demands the immediate withdrawal of the decision to take space from the Academy of Arts, an end to political pressure on Jovina Gymnasium, and a full revision of provincial and city cultural funding policies.

Those who are destroying the Academy, humiliating Jovina, undermining Sterijino Pozorje, and driving out EXIT are not only attacking culture and education. Is the real target the remaining autonomy of Vojvodina? Or is it everything that kept Serbia on the cultural map of Europe and the world—BITEF, FEST, the October Salon… What we are witnessing is Vučić’s premeditated revenge against all free-thinking individuals, with the intention of turning the state into a fairground and spectacle.