Scene alarmed

Styrian cultural budget: “Risk of clear-cutting”

Performance at the last spleen*graz festival

(Bild: Clemens Nestroy)

The Styrian cultural scene is alarmed. The funds for annual and project funding are to be cut by 40 percent, which would mean the end for many institutions. 

Even before the new Styrian state government intends to work out the details of its plans in the cultural sector at a closed meeting this weekend, IG Kultur Steiermark is reporting on concrete planned savings measures: The budget for annual and project funding, for example, is to be cut by around 40 percent. "This primarily affects small, non-profit art and cultural associations, which, as local cultural providers, enable lively cultural events for the local population," says Managing Director Lidija Krienzer-Radojevic.

Hundreds of cultural initiatives in Styria (from the spleen*festival for youth theater to the Grazer Kunstverein) received annual or project funding in 2024, with the state of Styria spending around 2.4 million euros on them. In 2025, the figure will be just 1.4 million euros.

Still no budget from the state and federal government
One problem: many of the services that have now been cut were never part of the official funding budget, but were only topped up as one-off payments as required by Christopher Drexler, the long-standing Provincial Councillor for Culture. In conjunction with the tense budget situation in Graz and at federal level (where there is also still no agreed budget for 2025 and the Department of Culture is currently only promising around half of the previous year's amount to those receiving annual funding), there is a "risk of a clear cut".

Lidija Krienzer-Radojevic, IG Kultur Steiermark.

(Bild: Gudrun Becker)

This is despite the fact that the state's culture budget has actually increased considerably in recent years (from 62.5 million in 2019 to around 85 million in the previous year). However, the majority of these increases went to the state cultural institutions (Bühnen Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, steirischer herbst and Volkskultur Steiermark GmbH), while the funding pot for the rest of the scene (including many representatives of folk culture) has stagnated for years. IG Kultur is now hoping that the new provincial government will make "compensating for this unequal treatment" "a priority in the cultural sector".

Incidentally, all those institutions that have a multi-year funding contract are not affected by the cuts for the time being - mainly because these contracts run until the end of 2025 and the funding period from 2026 to 2028 first has to be put out to tender. "But here, too, the nervousness is increasing," says Krienzer-Radojevic.