Kanye West’s European tour in doubt as more concerts cancelled in Poland and Switzerland
Kanye West’s upcoming concerts in Poland and Switzerland have been cancelled, as a growing number of European countries have stopped or postponed the US rapper’s performances amid a furore over his past antisemitic comments.
Kanye West’s upcoming concerts in Poland and Switzerland have been cancelled, as a growing number of European countries have stopped or postponed the US rapper’s performances amid a furore over his past antisemitic comments.
Swiss football club FC Basel, which is responsible for concerts and events that take place at its St Jakob-Park ground, told Reuters on Saturday that after reviewing a request for West to perform there in June, it decided against it.
“We cannot, in accordance with our values, provide a platform for the artist in question within this context,” a club spokesperson told Reuters.
On Friday, Silesian Stadium in Chorzów, Poland said it would also cancel West’s upcoming concert on 19 June, after the Polish culture ministry announced it was seeking to bar West from performing in the country.
“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,” the venue director, Adam Strzyzewski, announced in a press release on the stadium’s website.
Poland’s culture minister, Marta Cienkowska, earlier said West’s “promotion of nazism” was in “manifest contradiction with Poland’s values”, and condemned West as an artist who “openly declares he loves Hitler, who promotes Nazi ideology and makes money by selling T-shirts emblazoned with the swastika”.
“In a country marked by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment,” Cienkowska wrote on social media.
She added that Warsaw had the means to bar the entry of undesirable individuals and, if necessary, it “will resort to them”.
The decisions of Poland and FC Basel came days after the 48-year-old rapper, legally known as Ye, postponed a show in Marseille, France after local authorities voiced their opposition.
Earlier this month, Britain also blocked West from travelling there to headline London’s Wireless festival, leading to the cancellation of the entire festival at which he had been scheduled to perform over three nights in July.
The only remaining stops in West’s announced European tour are now Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, Madrid and Portugal.
West has previously said “I love Nazis”, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, sold T-shirts featuring a swastika on his website, and last year released a track titled Heil Hitler, which was banned by several streaming platforms.
In January he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to declare “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite” and “I love Jewish people”. He attributed his antisemitic behaviour to a “manic episode” brought on by his bipolar-1 disorder.
It was not the first time West had apologised: the rapper posted a statement in Hebrew in 2023, asking for forgiveness from Jewish people, but took that back and declared himself a Nazi in 2025.
