A Kanye West concert scheduled for June 19 in Poland has been cancelled following government pressure and condemnation over the US rapper’s history of antisemitic, racist, and pro-Nazi comments, the venue announced on Friday.
West, also known as Ye, was set to appear at the Silesian Stadium in Chorzów for his first performance in Poland in 15 years. The venue said the show would now not take place “due to formal and legal reasons.”
Marta Cienkowska, Poland’s culture and heritage minister, had described the decision to book West as “unacceptable.”
“We are talking about an artist who has publicly expressed antisemitic views, downplayed crimes, and profited from selling swastika T-shirts. This is a deliberate crossing of boundaries and the normalisation of hatred. Culture cannot be a space for those who exploit it to spread hatred,” Cienkowska wrote on X.
Promoting Nazi symbols is a criminal offence in Poland, and anyone found guilty can be imprisoned for up to three years. West’s comments were particularly painful in Poland, where under Nazi occupation during World War II, the Germans built and operated concentration and extermination camps to murder Europe’s Jews, including three million Polish Jews.
Prior to the venue’s announcement, culture ministry spokesman Piotr Jędrzejewski told the BBC that blocking the concert was not straightforward because there was no applicable law to stop it, but the foreign ministry agreed the concert should not happen.
The cancellation follows West postponing a gig in France and a UK ban from entering the country to headline Wireless Festival, which was eventually cancelled entirely.
In February last year, West started selling swastika T-shirts, prompting commerce platform Shopify to take down his web store. Three months later, he released the track “Heil Hitler.” In January, prior to the announcement of his European tour, West apologised in a full-page Wall Street Journal advert, saying, “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people,” and added that he had “lost touch with reality” because of his bipolar disorder.
