Instead of making headlines with the music played, the m4music festival now garners attention for an act that was cancelled at the last minute.
The festival is the annual event for Switzerland‘s music industry. It‘s sponsored by Migros, a cooperative that mainly runs grocery stores and is heavily invested in culture with its programme „Migros Kulturprozent“. Migros is also one of Switzerland‘s largest employers and, naturally, always in the public’s interest.
On Thursday, a day before the festival‘s start, they called off Bernarda’s show after public comments revealing that she had previously and multiple times performed for the „March for Life“ in Switzerland and Germany. The „March for Life“ is an ultra-conservative Christian movement trying to abolish abortion and equal marriage. One doesn‘t need to be an investigation specialist to find these past interactions like a concert at the „March for Life“ in Berlin in 2020.
In a statement to the newspaper „Tages-Anzeiger“, Migros said that „M4music does background checks, but always in the knowledge that the festival can also overlook something in view of various social and political topics, different channels and temporal depth.“ But the spokesperson also told the paper that at the point of the booking, they were not aware of Bernarda’s connection to „March for Life“.
So the main open question remains: When did the festival gain this awareness?
Open Questions
On the first evening of m4music, I spoke to several people with deeper insight into the matter. However, they were not comfortable talking on the record and remained cautious.
