A concert by US rapper Kanye West, known as Ye, scheduled to take place in a Polish stadium in June was cancelled 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,” wrote venue director Adam Strzyzewski in a press release on the stadium’s website.
The move comes after the UK banned West entry into the country, forcing him to cancel appearances there. He also postponed a concert in Marseille, France due to mounting opposition from city officials.
Holocaust survivors have called on other European countries to take similar steps against the controversial rapper.
Ye has also been barred from Australia, but he was able to perform in the US and Mexico City this year.
West has not commented on the Polish venue’s cancelation.
Why is there backlash against Kanye West?
The 48-year-old artist, once one of the most successful rappers in the world, has drawn widespread condemnation when he began making antisemitic opinions and voicing admiration for Adolf Hitler.
He has previously said “I love Nazis,” sold t-shirts featuring a swastika on his website, and even released a track last year titled “Heil Hitler.”
The song is currently banned by main streaming platforms.
But in January this year, Ye took out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal to reject and apoligize for his past behavior, saying “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite” and “I love Jewish people.”
The rapper said his controversial behavior was linked to a “manic episode” brought on by a diagnosed bipolar disorder.
Poland says Ye is ‘promoter of criminal ideology’
Prior to the venue’s cancelation, Poland’s Culture Ministry previously 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 said, according to AFP news agency.
Cienkowska expressed her “clearly negative position” about the June concert in the western city of Chorzow and urged organizers “not to make public space available to promoters of a criminal ideology”
She also said she could not imagine such a concert being held in Poland, “a country where people were murdered in German Nazi extermination camps,” Polish Press Agency PAP reported.
Over a million people, most of them Jews, were murdered on Polish soil at the Auschwitz death camp alone, during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
The Nazis killed more than 3 million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jewish population. By the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazis had killed over six million Jews in Europe.
Edited by: Wesley Dockery