The international peace conference will also take place this year parallel to the Munich Security Conference from February 16th to 18th – although financing is in jeopardy because the city of Munich wants to cancel its previous subsidy at short notice. “We will definitely hold the peace conference,” assures project leader Maria R. Feckl.
Under the motto “Where is Europe heading?” So on the weekend after next, possibilities for a more peaceful world will be discussed in the outdoor heating hall and the University of Philosophy, including with the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis as the most prominent speaker. “The contracts for the premises and with the speakers exist, flights and hotels have been booked,” says Feckl. A rejection is therefore no longer an option: “We are now hoping for lots and lots of donations.”
At the end of last week, city councilors from the Greens/Pink List and SPD/Volt requested that the subsidy for the event, which has always been paid out by the cultural department, be canceled with immediate effect. The reason for this was a lack of community connection and austerity measures in the city budget. “The symbolic level of funding shows that this cannot be taken seriously,” says the Die Linke/Die Party faction, which submitted a counter-motion to the city council on Tuesday, namely to continue to support the peace conference.
The financial subsidy is about 6,500 euros – for the cultural department “less than 0.01 percent of the budget for the promotion of art and culture”, as the sponsoring group of the peace conference calculated in a press release on Monday. For the organizers, however, a quarter of their budget, as Feckl says: “The reasons that are now being given for the cancellation have been around for 20 years.”
What particularly disappoints them is the fact that no one from the government coalition in the town hall spoke to the organizers before the motion was formulated and submitted. The organizers found out about this from the media, and they were “correspondingly shocked,” says Feckl: “We would have liked to have had a conversation. We hope someone will have mercy and explain to us what the problem really is.”
When asked, city councilors Mona Fuchs (Greens) and Julia Schönfeld-Knor (SPD) justified their parties’ decision by saying that there had been “irritations” about the appearance and organization of the peace conference for a long time. Feckl is now irritated by this again.
Concerns about the content of the peace conference are unofficially mentioned
There was a controversy four years ago because the organizers at the time rejected the Jewish SPD city councilor Marian Offman as the person to deliver a greeting from the city, whereupon the 2020 event was canceled completely. But Feckl cannot imagine that this scandal will continue to have an impact: In the years that followed, there was good cooperation with the city again with a new organizational team. In 2022, the then Second Mayor Katrin Haben Schaden (Greens) gave the welcoming speech, and together with Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) an appeal for the abolition of all nuclear weapons was also drawn up that year.
Behind the scenes, substantive reasons for the deletion could still be heard in the town hall. For example, the concern that speakers could put Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine into perspective and thus put a strain on Munich’s relations with its sister city Kiev. Or the proximity of some speakers to conspiracy theories. Or the concern that there might be a lack of distancing from the terrorist organization Hamas at an event where the city appears as a sponsor with its logo. And Offman’s disinvitation continues to this day.
The cancellation of the subsidy can therefore be understood as a demonstrative act. The cultural department could have let such a small position with no real cultural connection expire without a decision from the city council. Through the application, the approval of the majority of the town hall is politically documented to the outside world.
For Feckl, “it’s all speculation.” There was no official criticism, she says. The left-wing city councilor Brigitte Wolf therefore demands: “If the Green-Red have something against the peace conference, then they should critically examine its content, enter into the discussion and not simply cut off the funding.”