Pro-Israel Czechia may provide US rapper and ‘reformed antisemite’ Kanye West oddly favourable ground to return to the European stage this summer. “No sins as long as there’s permission,” American rappers Kanye West and Jay-Z sang in their 2012 hit No Church in the Wild.
Unfolding in night-time scenes of civil unrest and rebellion, the nihilistic-infused clip explores the search for a personal belief system in a relativist and chaotic world outside of organised religion.
That Prague’s city centre and atheistic Czechia were picked back then to shoot the video might have been an opportune choice or a mere coincidence. Yet 15 years on, the fact controversial US rapper and music producer Kanye West – now going by Ye – might return to the European stage with a planned summer concert in Prague is prompting questions about how Czechs approach freedom of speech, and which part of the country's history continues to shape the public mindset.
Still from the video clip of ‘No Church in the Wild’ shot in Prague, Czech Republic
Ye means no
A 24-time Grammy winner praised by some as a musical visionary and reviled by others as a self-aggrandising megalomaniac, the 48-year-old West has experienced a significant fall from grace in recent years, largely a result of repeated antisemitic and Nazi-admiring statements.
Past controversies include West explicitly describing himself as an “antisemite”, a “Nazi” and a “racist”; suggesting there were “good things about Hitler”; vowing to go “death con 3 on Jewish people”; and selling T-shirts with swastikas and releasing a track called Heil Hitler.
A public apology in 2023 was quickly cast aside in favour of doubling down on antisemitic comments. “I will never apologise for my Jewish comments,” he declared in February 2025.
But as sponsors jumped ship and venues started cancelling appearances, West issued another apology in January with a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal, where he pinned his outbursts on bipolar disorder, which had made him “lose touch with reality” during a months-long manic and paranoid episode. “I’m not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jews,” he wrote.
“I know it takes time to understand the sincerity of my commitment to make amends,” he tweeted in April after his mea culpa. “I take full responsibility for what’s mine, but I don’t want to put my fans in the middle of it. My fans are everything to me.”
But West’s history of past U-turns and disingenuous apologies meant it failed to convince many. And for many governments and promoters across Europe, West is still seen as too divisive and toxic a figure.
Last year, a planned concert in Slovakia at the Rubicon festival was cancelled, and tentative talks about moving it to Prague did not materialise. Scheduled to perform at the Wireless Festival in the UK this summer, West has been denied entry to the country, leading to the entire festival being cancelled. Additional shows in Basel, Switzerland and Marseille, France have, for now, been put indefinitely on hold.
West’s planned June concert in Poland also faced a significant public backlash, and high-level government officials didn’t hesitate to weigh in.
“In a country marked by the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment,” commented Polish Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska. “Freedom of artistic expression does not mean consent to everything. Culture cannot be a space for those who abuse it to spread hatred.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was also quoted as saying that “fascists belong in prison” and Poland would, anyway, refuse entry to the rapper.
West’s official schedule still has a few concerts planned in Europe as part of his world tour. On April 30, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama announced on Facebook that a concert by West would go ahead in Tirana on July 11, and a Georgian state-owned company also revealed that the rapper would perform in Tbilisi on June 12. A Prague racecourse also appears prepared to host a concert by the rapper later that month.
View of the Chuchle Arena racecourse in Prague, Czech Republic. Credit: Official website of the Chuchle Arena
Horsing around
“Yes, we have a contract and a date: it will be July 25,” confirmed Zuzana Rambova, the director of the Chuchle Arena, a racecourse in Prague’s 5th district.
According to Rambova, the venue has already signed a contract with HUGO Productions – a company owned by Slovak businessman Hugo Varga who was behind last year’s failed Rubicon experiment – and negotiations are underway to hold a West concert in late July on the grounds of the racecourse, a privately-owned property which has a capacity of about 50,000.
“We are not the ones who should evaluate whether the artist performs or not,” Rambova argued. “We are certainly not in the era of socialism, where we somehow persecute artists,” adding that fans who “will buy a ticket or not” are the ones who will decide.
In a statement to local investigative outlet Page Not Found, Varga also insisted West was not an extremist but an artist who suffered from psychological problems and, despite his past mistakes, should be allowed to perform for his fans.
Yet despite this confirmation from the venue’s director, there are signs that not everything has been squared away. The Prague concert appears nowhere in West’s tour schedule, nor is it listed on Chuchle Arena’s website or any ticketing platforms.
And just like last year, Prague city officials aren’t too happy about the prospect. “Prague has no place for a Kanye West concert: period,” said Prague Deputy Mayor Jaromir Beranek. “We must not allow culture to be exploited to promote hateful ideologies.”
Several Prague municipal councillors have also insisted that no such concert would ever receive the go-ahead on any land owned by the city.
The choice of venue – a racecourse not known for musical entertainment that doesn’t even list concerts as an option for renting the space – may itself seem rather odd, or desperate. “In our opinion, the event completely exceeds the logistical possibility and capacity” of the place, noted Jan Kren, the mayor of the Velka Chuchle district where the arena is located.
Rambova also admitted that holding the concert would mean moving at their own expense the horses stabled at the arena, prompting questions as to how profitable such a venture would turn out to be. After all, the rapper was due to be paid 7 million dollars for last year’s cancelled concert in Slovakia, according to Page Not Found.
US entertainer Kanye West (R) shows a cell phone depicting the image of an aircraft to US President Donald J. Trump (L) during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 11 October 2018. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Freedom to rap
The possibility of a West concert in Prague is pitting two distinct visions of how far artistic freedom should extend, and whether freedom of expression ought to be limited if it involves hate speech and the spread of hateful ideologies.
“It seemed to us that, especially as a state that has experience with the Nazi occupation, we should come together and say that Prague is simply not a place to celebrate Hitler,” argued Johana Nejedlova, an activist and co-author of a successful petition last year to stop West’s concert in the Czech capital.
Last week, the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities issued a statement calling it “unacceptable that in a country that experienced the Holocaust and is still home to survivors of Nazi rampage, a person who publicly and repeatedly spread sympathy for Nazism and hatred not only towards Jews” would be allowed to perform.
Meanwhile, another petition – one that gathered just a few hundred signatures – against censoring West for his past statements claimed “this is not just one concert. It is a signal of how open Prague is to modern culture.”
It is still possible that West’s planned concert in Prague this summer will suffer the same fate as last year’s, though promoters and organisers will find the political mood in the country has shifted slightly in their favour compared to last year.
In office since December, the new Czech government led by Prime Minister Andrej Babis has repeatedly railed against a “new totalitarianism” which, its members argue, undermines freedom of speech and promotes self-censorship under the guise of fighting misinformation and hate speech.
While opponents to West’s concert tend to refer to the country’s Nazi past and Holocaust history, its supporters point to the ravages of censorship in Communist and normalisation-era Czechoslovakia, likening any attempt to limit free speech to totalitarian overreach.
“Let everyone defend their opinion. I will not decide who is right and who is wrong, it often changes depending on the development of the situation,” summed up Justice Minister Jeronym Tejc, who has vowed to push criminal reform to limit prosecution for hate speech.
The Advisory Council of Prime Minister Babis now includes a so-called advisor on freedom of speech, a post seemingly created out of thin air and currently occupied by Natalie Vachatova, a former far-right local politician and ex-analyst at the Society for the Defence of Freedom of Expression, a think tank that pushes for a “conservative counter-revolution”.
With the new government “having completely given up on fighting disinformation and hate speech”, according to some commentators, West’s antisemitism – whether genuinely reformed or not – might prove less problematic to the current leadership than any hint of censorship and ‘cancel culture’.
“No one must be afraid to expression their position” and “freedom of expression is inviolable”, the government’s program statement reads.
Meanwhile, the leader of the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) party and speaker of the house, Tomio Okamura, now enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for a billboard campaign widely seen as racist and xenophobic. He has consistently complained of being prosecuted simply for expressing his opinion.
At the same time, the honorary president of the Motorists, an ultra-conservative, “anti-woke” coalition partner, Filip Turek regularly makes headlines for his Nazi-admiring quirks and fascist-inspired dehumanising rhetoric with little consequences – although his controversies did lead President Petr Pavel to veto his ministerial aspirations.
Coming at a time of renewed attacks against critical NGOs and media outlets, the government’s self-described “free speech absolutism” has been slammed by critics as disingenuous, hypocritical and self-serving.
“Today, those parties that have been working with the motive of freedom of speech for a long time are in power,” pointed out Ales Michal, an academic and expert on extremism. “For the SPD, it is part of a long-time strategy; for ANO it is more of a rhetorical addition to define themselves against political opponents; for the Motorists, it is suitable as a fight against the left.”