SERBIA: Police in a Novi Sad Faculty & more – 27th Jan 2026

Dobar dan from Oakley! This is the Rorshok Serbia Update from the 27th of January twenty twenty-six. A quick summary of what's going down in Serbia.

Kicking off this episode, on Wednesday the 21st, at the Faculty of Philosophy in the northern city of Novi Sad, students blocked the building in protest against the dismissal of professor Jelena Kleut, whom they believe was fired for her support of the student protests. They demanded that the faculty officials reinstate Kleut in order to end the blockade. Their dean, however, called the police, who then forcibly removed the students and lecturers blocking the faculty.

The academic society in Serbia accused the authorities of violating university autonomy by entering the premises of the faculty and kicking students and professors out. Students across the country organized protests in support of their peers from Novi Sad, amplifying their demand for Kleut’s return.

Recall that the anti-corruption student-led protests started following the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which killed sixteen people.

Meanwhile, the media freedom reporting website Cenzolovka published its findings on the recent acquisition of several news outlets by pro-regime media tycoons.

Best Media Team from Belgrade, whose owner is close to government officials, acquired TV5, Lav Plus from the western town of Uzice and Drina Info Portal from the western town of Bajina Basta on the 14th of January. Aside from buying existing media outlets, the company has also been rapidly launching news portals on social media.

Cenzolovka pointed out that the buyouts and launches of news portals happened in areas where local elections are set to take place this year. They believe that the ruling party will use these outlets to control the narrative, contributing to media darkness.

Now, an update to a story from our previous show, in which we reported on a coordinated shutdown of several anti-corruption and student groups' social media accounts. Even though all the accounts were recovered, the Association of Independent Electronic Media, or ANEM, has demanded that prosecutors investigate the shutdown, accusing the government of being behind the attempted censorship. On Tuesday the 20th, ANEM reported that some of these accounts received emails from anonymous senders claiming to be behind the shutdowns, noting that the emails expressed favoritism towards President Vucic.

On a related note, the ruling regime tried to silence us on YouTube because telling the truth is not on its agenda. An army of trolls made complaints to shut down our channel, but we managed to get it back up!

Still on censorship and violent breaches of freedom, Predrag Petrović, the director of research at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, published an article in Serbian about the hostility of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS. Petrovic highlighted that the SNS’s anti-system extremist movement, with a de facto one-person rule, has replaced democracy in Serbia. He said that the thirteen-year-long rule of the SNS has led to the hollowing out of public institutions, with those working in them being replaced by supporters of the ruling party.

Petrovic said that the SNS and Vucic use tactics such as conspiracy theories about fabricated enemies targeting the country and hate speech in the media they control to fuel hate and hostility against those who dare to oppose them.

Read the full article with the link in the show notes!

Next up, on Thursday the 22nd the European Parliament’s fact-finding mission visited Serbia to hold meetings with both the ruling and opposition parties. However, we mentioned last week that Vucic and his party peers had declined to meet with the mission’s representatives, because they supported the student protests.

Representatives listened to the opposition parties' grievances about Serbia’s stalled progress toward EU accession and the autocratic state of Serbian politics. They proposed that the EU cut Serbia's funds from the European Commission’s Growth Plan to pressure the country to implement the reforms required to join the EU.

On the other hand, ruling party members criticized the European Parliament, accusing it of coming to Serbia just to oppose them and their rule.

Speaking of the EU, its Special Representative for the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue announced on Friday the 23rd that Serbia and Kosovo's negotiators have agreed to form a joint commission for finding missing persons from the nineteen ninety-eight - nineteen ninety-nine war. This decision comes nearly two years after Vucic and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Kurti agreed to a declaration on missing persons. The EU representative said that this move raises hope that more people missing from the Kosovo war, whose burial sites are unknown, would be found. The joint commission for finding the missing persons would overlook the investigation and searches.

The nineteen ninety-eight - nineteen ninety-nine war between Kosovo and Serbia resulted in many deaths, with most of the victims being Kosovo Albanians buried in unmarked graves..

In some news about energy, the US has extended the operating licence of the state-owned energy company NIS until the 20th of February. The move came after Hungary's oil company MOL agreed to buy the Russian-held majority stake in NIS. The sale is likely to go through around the end of March.

Recall that the US sanctioned NIS due to its majorly-Russian ownership, conditioning Serbia to remove Russia from the company’s stakes in order to reverse sanctions.

As for the economy, the credit rating agency Fitch published a report on Serbia and assigned the country a BB plus credit rating, which is the same as in its last report. The rating of BB plus is one level below investment grade, meaning that the country is a higher risk for investors than investment-grade countries.

However, Fitch praised Serbia for responsible fiscal management, high foreign-exchange reserves, and higher GDP per capita compared to nations with the same credit rating.

Still on the economic front, the State Statistical Office published salary data for the month of November twenty twenty-five on Monday the 26th. They reported that the average monthly salary amounted to around 110,000 dinars, which is around 1,100 dollars - an eleven percent increase compared to the same period in twenty twenty-four. The median net monthly salary came out at around 87,000 dinars (around 880 dollars).

Speaking of money, the Ministry of Finance announced on Wednesday the 21st that the government had signed an agreement with the US-based Archer Aviation to acquire air taxi services ahead of the EXPO twenty twenty-seven exhibition. Under the agreement, Serbia will be able to purchase up to twenty-five aircraft while Archer will act as the official air taxi partner for EXPO twenty twenty-seven.

The EXPO twenty twenty-seven exhibition, which some citizens are heavily against due to concerns about money laundering, is set to take place in Belgrade next year from March to August. The exhibition will include 120 participating countries and Serbia has already invested nearly two trillion dinars in it, which is around twenty billion dollars.

Since we mentioned EU investments earlier, the European Investment Bank, or the EIB, announced that it will lend around eighteen billion dinars (176 million dollars) to reconstruct 540 km, or around 340 miles, of local and national roads. In a press release from Thursday the 22nd, the EIB said that the loan aims to improve road safety, reduce environmental impact and travel time.

Closing this episode with some cultural news, on the 7th and the 8th of February, the Serbian National Theater will host the Bolshoi Drama Theater from Saint Petersburg, which will perform a play called The Subjects. The play combines historical chronicle, psychological melodrama and tragicomedy, as it follows the daily lives of a noble family in Saint Petersburg. The play is aimed at audiences over the age of sixteen. Tickets are on sale at the Serbian National Theatre box office and online.

For more information about the play, check out the link in the show notes!

Aaand that’s it for this week! Thank you for joining us!

Vidimo se!