Serbia’s EXIT music festival plans homecoming after student election victory

NOVI SAD, Serbia (AP) — Founded by protesting students in Serbia in 2000, the EXIT festival has become one of Europe’s leading music events. It is now preparing a “special edition” next year to mark a homecoming made possible by a new generation of activists in the Balkan country.

EXIT pulled out of Serbia last year, citing pressure from authorities over its support for a student movement behind a wave of anti-corruption protests. After students scored a stunning victory in the Oct. 25 parliamentary election, EXIT announced it was returning home.

“We always said when freedom is back in Serbia, EXIT will be back as well,” founder and CEO Dusan Kovacevic told The Associated Press in an interview this week. “We are incredibly proud of them (students), and of the citizens and all of us (who) managed to win this fight.”

Traditionally held every July at the Petrovaradin Fortress in Serbia’s northern city of Novi Sad, EXIT has won several international awards and hosted hundreds of stars from the Pet Shop Boys and Billy Idol to Moby and the Prodigy. The dayslong, multi-stage festival has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors worldwide.

But, Kovacevic said, EXIT was “blacklisted” by authorities after backing the student-led protests that erupted in response to a deadly train station canopy collapse in Novi Sad in 2024. The festival lost funding and faced security threats, blackmail and cancellations by sponsors who had backed it from its early days, he said.

“It was not possible to continue organizing EXIT in Serbia under such pressures and such circumstances,” Kovacevic said.

Serbian authorities at the time denied putting political pressure on the festival.

Former strongman ruler Aleksandar Vucic and his right-wing party were accused while in power of stifling democratic freedoms and of rampant corruption, which they have denied. Many in Serbia believed the canopy collapse, which killed 16 people at the renovated Novi Sad station, stemmed from corruption and negligence.

Having founded EXIT during the movement against then-President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, Kovacevic said he knew the risks of taking on an authoritarian regime. “I think we went full circle,” he said.

At the 2025 anniversary festival, EXIT was nearly left without official security after it displayed banners in support of the students, Kovacevic said. Italian singer Gala, whose hit “Freed from Desire” became an anthem of the protests, also opened the festival’s main stage alongside protesting students.

“We knew that we were risking everything we created,” he said. But he said EXIT could do it no other way: “We didn’t develop social responsibility as a sector inside the festival. We were born out of it.”

EXIT has championed projects to raise awareness of the dangers of drugs and promote regional cooperation in the divided Balkans. After it left Serbia, it organized several events in the region and against the backdrop of the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

During their protests in 2000, students at the Novi Sad university held weeks of concert parties, theater and movie events that turned into EXIT the following year.

Serbia in 2000 was eager to come out of international isolation after years of sanctions, wars and a NATO bombing in 1999, Kovacevic recalled. The energy was such that “almost all the artists said that they had one of the best gigs in their career,” he said.

The festival next year could rival those from the initial years, Kovacevic predicted. While EXIT had initially planned to return in 2028, “thousands and thousands” of messages came pleading for a 2027 event, he said.

“The excitement is huge,” Kovacevic said. “We all expect something very special to happen, and we expect that it will be one of the best editions so far.”