A concert by US rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, that had been scheduled for mid-June at a Polish stadium was canceled by the venue on Friday.
“The concert by Ye (Kanye West), scheduled for 19 June 2026 at the Superauto.pl Silesian Stadium, will not take place due to formal and legal reasons,” stadium director Adam Strzyzewski said in a press release on the venue’s website.
The decision follows the UK government’s refusal to allow West entry, which forced him to cancel shows there, and the postponement of a planned concert in Marseille after opposition from local officials. Holocaust survivors have urged other European countries to take similar action. West has also been barred from Australia, though he has performed this year in the US and Mexico City. West has not publicly commented on the Polish cancellation.
Why is there backlash against Kanye West?
Once among the world’s most successful rappers, the 48-year-old has faced widespread condemnation for increasingly antisemitic statements and expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler. He has said “I love Nazis,” sold T-shirts featuring a swastika, and released a track last year titled “Heil Hitler,” which has been removed from major streaming platforms.
In January he placed a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal rejecting and apologizing for his past behavior, writing “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite” and “I love Jewish people.” He has linked his controversial actions to a “manic episode” related to a bipolar disorder diagnosis.
Poland says Ye is a “promoter of criminal ideology”
Before the stadium’s cancellation, Poland’s Culture Ministry said it would seek to stop West from performing in the country. “The widely discussed actions of Kanye West, linked to his promotion of Nazism, are in manifest contradiction with Poland’s values,” Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska told AFP. She said she was clearly opposed to the June concert in Chorzów and urged organizers “not to make public space available to promoters of a criminal ideology.”
Cienkowska added that she could not imagine such an event taking place in Poland, “a country where people were murdered in German Nazi extermination camps.” During the Nazi occupation in World War II, more than one million people, most of them Jews, were killed at Auschwitz alone. The Nazis murdered more than three million of Poland’s prewar Jewish population of about 3.2 million, and by the end of World War II over six million Jews had been killed across Europe.
Edited by: Wesley Dockery