Members of the Munich city council, a coalition of the SPD and the Green Party, are seeking to prevent Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters from performing his This Is Not a Drill show at the city-owned Olympiahalle on May 21, 2023. Advance sales for the concert have already begun.

Cancelling the hall, which has over 15,000 seats, would be tantamount to banning Waters from performing in Munich, under conditions where no comparable facility is available. This blatant attempt at censorship is justified solely on the grounds of Waters’ political stance, which runs counter to the interests of the ruling elite in Germany.

As the WSWS wrote about Waters’ concert tour, which began in the US in July, almost every one of his songs “deals with the pressing issues of our time: imperialist war, fascism, the poison of nationalism, the plight of refugees, the victims of state oppression, global poverty, social inequality, the assault on democratic rights and the threat of nuclear annihilation.”

The SPD and the Greens—as well as governing in the city of Munich, both parties are also partners in the federal government—are absolutely determined to prevent any discussion of these issues and will stop at nothing to discredit Waters. They are denouncing him as an anti-Semite and Putin supporter, although such accusations are demonstrably false.