Seventy years after its founding as a unifying celebration of cross-continental music, the Eurovision Song Contest is confronting the most severe crisis in its history, as deep divisions over Israel’s participation in the 2026 Vienna-hosted event have sparked an unprecedented boycott by five major European public broadcasters. The roots of this year’s upheaval stretch back to the 2025 Eurovision final held in Basel, Switzerland, where geopolitical tensions boiled over long before the final winner was announced.
Anti-Israel protests, organized in opposition to Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza that began in October 2023, surrounded the 2025 contest venue. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered, bearing Palestinian flags and covering their bodies in fake blood to symbolize civilian casualties in Gaza, which the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry puts at more than 72,000. The unrest spilled into the arena during the final, when two protesters attempted to storm the stage during Israeli contestant Yuval Raphael’s performance, throwing paint that accidentally struck a Eurovision crew member. As the final vote counts rolled in, the atmosphere in the venue reached a fever pitch of tension: audience members chanted for second-place contender Austria, with many openly praying Israel would not secure enough points to win the right to host 2026’s event. When Austria ultimately claimed the top spot, UK Eurovision commentator Graham Norton joked that organizers were breathing a huge sigh of relief at avoiding a 2026 final in Tel Aviv.
Beneath the surface, the 2025 result sparked lasting controversy that set the stage for this year’s boycott. While Raphael earned only middling scores from competition judges, she won the public vote by a wide margin – a result that immediately drew scrutiny from multiple broadcasters. Critics pointed out that official Israeli government accounts, including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had urged supporters to vote for Raphael the maximum 20 times per person, a practice allowed under contest rules. The implication was that the strong public showing reflected coordinated mass voting rather than organic popular support for Raphael’s entry.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the annual contest, launched an independent audit of the results, which confirmed there was no evidence that mass voting disproportionately skewed the final outcome. The EBU reaffirmed that the 2025 result was valid and robust, but that finding failed to ease growing discontent among member broadcasters. Calls for a broader review of the longstanding voting system grew, with many outlets arguing that the current framework no longer guaranteed a fair reflection of viewer opinion.
The 2025 near-win for Israel brought decades of simmering tensions over geopolitics’ role in Eurovision voting to a breaking point. This year, that tension has erupted into the biggest boycott in the contest’s 70-year history. While 35 countries are still set to participate in the 2026 contest, public broadcasters from Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia have all withdrawn in opposition to Israel’s inclusion.
Boycotting outlets cite a range of overlapping reasons, most rooted in protest against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Many have explicitly accused the Israeli government of genocide, a charge Israel vehemently denies. While the boycotting broadcasters insist their decisions were made independently, most align with the official stances of their national governments – all of which have strongly criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, and recently joined a failed push to suspend the European Union’s preferential trade relations with Israel.
This unprecedented action marks a sharp escalation from previous years, when only a handful of broadcasters raised public objections to Israel’s participation after the Gaza war began, with none withdrawing from the 2024 or 2025 contests. Israel’s Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar has dismissed the boycott as shameful and hypocritical, arguing that Eurovision should remain a celebration of music and cross-cultural connection, not a platform for political grandstanding.
Geopolitical influence is nothing new for Eurovision. For decades, politically aligned and neighboring nations have consistently exchanged higher public votes, and contest historian Dr. Dean Vuletic, author of *Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest*, notes that entry to the contest has long been used as a political tool. Since the Cold War era, countries have used Eurovision participation to signal international legitimacy or geopolitical alignment, from Franco’s 1961 Spanish debut to non-aligned Yugoslavia’s early participation amid the Cold War divide.
Past conflicts have also spurred isolated withdrawals, but those were typically temporary and regionally contained: Greece boycotted in 1975 over Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, Armenia skipped the 2012 contest hosted by Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh tensions, and Lebanon withdrew ahead of its 2005 debut rather than comply with EBU rules requiring it to broadcast all entries, including Israel’s. The only time Morocco participated, in 1980, it was the one year Israel did not compete, a connection widely accepted as the reason for its one-off appearance. This year’s boycott, however, is broader and more foundational, challenging the EBU’s core ability to keep geopolitics from overwhelming the competition.
For boycotting broadcasters, the core issue is that the presence of a country actively at war undermines the integrity of the contest as a purely musical competition. Natalija Gorščak, president of the management board of Slovenia’s withdrawing broadcaster RTV, explained that widespread public protest from Eurovision fans over sharing a stage with Israel pushed her organization to take an ethical stand for peace. Gorščak argues that even though Raphael, an Israeli survivor of the October 7 Hamas attack on the Nova music festival who performed with shrapnel still in her leg, met all EBU rules requiring entries to be non-political, her participation was inherently symbolic and political.
The 2022 Russian expulsion from Eurovision following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Ukraine’s subsequent victory that same year, has also amplified calls for rule change. The EBU ruled that a Russian entry would bring the contest into disrepute, and Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra went on to win the 2022 contest, thanks in part to a wave of politically motivated public solidarity voting. Critics, including Gorščak, argue this set a precedent that questions the fairness of the contest: political solidarity voting overwhelmingly benefits entries from countries involved in active conflict, sidelining performers from other nations regardless of the quality of their music.
Critics of the status quo now argue that the EBU’s longstanding rule, which allows any EBU member broadcaster to field an entry regardless of whether their country is at war, needs urgent reform. “When there is political conflict we should really think how the representative from the aggressor’s part and from the victim’s part should be involved and how they could be involved,” Gorščak said. “This is the debate I think we need to have within Eurovision.” Spain’s public broadcaster chair José Pablo López echoed that call at a parliamentary hearing earlier this year, urging a full overhaul of EBU statutes to bar countries in active conflict from participating. A senior official from a non-boycotting broadcaster acknowledged the widespread frustration, admitting that “a country from a conflict creates a bigger one for the contest” and that current rules do not create an equal playing field for all participants.
Opponents of a rule change and the boycott argue that barring Israel (or any nation) from participation violates Eurovision’s core founding values of unity and inclusivity. Dana International, who won Eurovision for Israel in 1998, argued online that “you don’t punish an entire country because you disagree politically with its government… Announcing a withdrawal from Eurovision harms the very idea of peace, harms Israel, and harms the contest itself.” Israeli public broadcaster Kan, which holds Israel’s EBU membership, has repeatedly affirmed it has not broken any contest rules, and argues that disqualifying it would undermine the core values the EBU claims to uphold. Notably, the EBU itself has previously defended Kan from sustained political attacks by the current Israeli government, which has threatened the public broadcaster’s independence and existence amid proposed broadcast reforms.
In response to growing criticism, the EBU has made minor adjustments to rules for 2026, cutting the maximum number of votes per viewer from 20 to 10 and introducing new guidelines discouraging disproportionate promotion by third parties including government agencies. Even so, the EBU issued a formal warning to Kan just ahead of the 2026 contest after current Israeli representative Noam Bettan published social media posts instructing followers to “vote 10 times for Israel,” a move organizers said violated the spirit of the competition. Kan complied with a request to remove the content.
As final preparations wrap up for the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, the event remains mired in political controversy rather than being able to focus on the music, performance and spectacle that define the annual competition. Insiders report that this year it has been harder than ever to recruit participating artists, many of whom worry about reputational damage amid the growing partisan divide over the event. Petitions and protests continue to surround the contest, even as organizers reaffirm their commitment to their founding mission of providing a platform for peace and unity in a divided world.
Looking ahead, the central question facing Eurovision remains: can the 70-year-old competition adapt to a more divided geopolitical landscape, or will it be permanently redefined as a forum for political expression, rather than the celebration of music it was founded to be?
