分类： entertainment

As the curtains rise on the 70th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna starting Tuesday, the iconic over-the-top European pop music celebration finds itself overshadowed by deep political division, centered on the debate over Israel’s inclusion in this year’s competition.

For a week leading up to the first semifinal, the Austrian capital has been decked in the contest’s signature branding, with heart motifs lining city streets and banners bearing this year’s official motto, “United by Music.” Thirty-five national acts have gathered to compete for the coveted continental musical crown, but five countries — Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland — have already pulled out in a coordinated boycott of Israel’s participation.

Tensions are running high in Vienna, where multiple pro-Palestinian demonstrations are scheduled throughout the contest week, prompting a massive security deployment. Austrian law enforcement from across the country have been reassigned to the capital, with additional operational support from neighboring German police forces. The heightened security posture also comes in the wake of a recent terror plot revelation: just last month, a 21-year-old Austrian man pled guilty to plotting an attack on a 2024 Taylor Swift concert in Vienna after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group. Sylvia Mayer, head of Austria’s domestic intelligence service DSN, warned that the current terror threat level remains elevated, with risks posed both by Islamist extremist networks and groups affiliated with Iran.

Israeli representative Noam Bettan is among the 15 acts set to take the stage at the Wiener Stadthalle arena for Tuesday’s first semifinal, where he will perform his ballad “Michelle” to compete for a spot in Saturday’s grand final. Bettan is aiming to secure Israel a second consecutive final berth after the country took second place in last year’s contest. Like 2024 Israeli competitor Yuval Raphael, Bettan has already prepared for potential hostile reception, training to continue his performance even if audiences boo him. The top 10 vote-getters from Tuesday’s semifinal will advance to the final, joining the 10 qualifiers from Thursday’s second semifinal. Automatic final spots are reserved for the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy — the contest’s largest financial backers — as well as 2024 winner Austria, which qualifies automatically as this year’s host.

Heading into the competition, Finland is the clear bookmakers’ favorite to take the crown, with high-energy entry “Liekinheitin” (“Flamethrower”) performed by violinist Linda Lampenius and pop vocalist Pete Parkkonen. Other notable acts in Tuesday’s semifinal include Greek contender Akylas with fan-favorite party rap track “Ferto” (“Bring It”), Portuguese vocal group Bandidos do Cante with the soulful ballad “Rosa,” and San Marino representative Senhit’s upbeat party anthem “Superstar,” which features a surprise guest spot from Culture Club icon Boy George.

Long known as a space for playful, and occasionally sharp, national rivalries, Eurovision has increasingly struggled to insulate itself from geopolitics in recent years. In 2022, Russia was expelled from the competition immediately following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The 2024 contest in Malmo, Sweden, and last year’s event in Basel, Switzerland, both saw large pro-Palestinian protests calling for Israel’s expulsion over its military campaign in Gaza against Hamas, alongside allegations of rule-breaking coordinated marketing efforts to secure votes for Israeli contestants.

After the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the governing body of Eurovision, rejected demands to remove Israel from this year’s lineup, the five boycotting nations announced their non-participation last December. In response to widespread vote-rigging allegations from past contests, the EBU has implemented stricter voting rules for this year’s event, cutting the maximum number of votes per person in half to 10 and adding new safeguards to detect and block “suspicious or coordinated voting activity.”

Despite the ongoing controversy and public divisions, Eurovision historian Dean Vuletic, author of *Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest*, says he is confident the long-running competition will navigate this latest challenge, just as it has overcome countless past crises. “We’ll see demonstrations, but we’ll also see a lot of colorful events going on which will really represent what Eurovision is about, which is bringing Europeans together,” Vuletic explained. “If you look at the history of Eurovision, it’s gone through so many crises, so many political challenges, so many geopolitical changes in Europe, and it’s always managed to survive.”

Against the persistent backdrop of air-raid sirens and the constant threat of missile strikes, Ukraine’s capital Kyiv has played host to a landmark contemporary art fair that carries a profound, quiet mission: to help a war-battered nation process the unthinkable new normal that full-scale conflict has imposed on daily life. Organized by the long-running cultural platform Art Kyiv, the exhibition, titled *This is Normal*, opened at the city’s Lavra Gallery this cycle, marking only the second time the event has been held since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, following an inaugural launch last October.

Anna Avetova, director of Art Kyiv, explains that the decision to hold the fair amid active conflict was not an oversight, but a deliberate ideological choice. “Holding the event during wartime means not waiting for a better moment, but working with reality as it is,” Avetova says. Unlike many cultural initiatives in Ukraine that center overt narratives of war, *This is Normal* makes a purposeful choice: no exhibition booth is dedicated exclusively to conflict. The war permeates every conversation and every unspoken moment in the gallery, Avetova notes, but curators intentionally rejected the urge to force the topic to the forefront. Instead, the fair positions art as a unifying thread that binds everyday life to cultural memory, rather than a separate compartment separated from the national crisis. “In this context, art does not stand apart from life — it helps make sense of the present, preserve cultural continuity, and lay the groundwork for the future,” Avetova adds. “Art is one of the things that keeps us human. It sustains us and warms our soul when things are very hard.”

Hundreds of works fill the gallery space, spanning an extraordinary range of mediums and styles: from abstract ceramic sculpture and textured mixed-media installations to expressive abstract canvases, surreal portraits, and atmospheric landscape paintings. All works on display are primarily available for purchase, part of a secondary yet critical goal of the fair: to revitalize Ukraine’s stagnant domestic art market. The sector already ground to a near-halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the full-scale invasion delivered a far more devastating blow, shuttering galleries, displacing artists, and drying up collector demand. Today, as the market begins to stir back to slow life, the fair stands as proof that Ukrainian creators are ready not only to create for reflection, but to participate in the global and domestic art economy once more.

The fair has drawn together dozens of Ukraine’s most prominent galleries, leading artists, local collectors, and leading cultural institutions, all gathering in a space where air-raid sirens occasionally cut through artist talks and gallery walks. For many participating creators, the opportunity to exhibit in Kyiv right now carries personal as well as national meaning.

Ceramic artist Tala Vovk is showing her work at a major Kyiv fair for the first time. She makes a point of attending every cultural event she can in the capital, explaining that these gatherings offer a vital chance to step away from the constant stress of war and detach from the pervasive grief surrounding the conflict. “Art is a place where the everyday doesn’t exist,” Vovk says. She argues that sustaining cultural activity through wartime is not a trivial distraction, but an investment in Ukraine’s long-term future. Nourishing the country’s cultural foundation now, she explains, gives it space to take root and grow stronger once the war ends, and that strength will sustain the nation through every challenge ahead.

For artist Yuriy Vatkin, whose work is featured at the fair, art has already served as a lifeline through the darkest days of the invasion. When the full-scale war began, Vatkin found himself trapped under Russian occupation in the corridor between Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and the Russian border. Even after an attack damaged his studio, painting remained a tool to survive and protect his mental health, according to his representative Denys Dmytriev. True to the fair’s ethos, Vatkin’s displayed works avoid explicit war imagery. Instead, they lean into his signature style: thick, layered brushstrokes, fragmented forms, and vivid, unexpected color palettes that evoke a quiet sense of motion and instability that resonates with the current moment.

Visitors echo the artists’ belief that continuing cultural life amid war is a radical act of resilience. Anna Domashchenko, a first-time attendee, says she was drawn to Vatkin’s rich, saturated hues, which stir intense, vital emotions that feel missing from daily life under war. She attends as many art events as possible in Kyiv, and says she often hears questions about whether such events are appropriate amid ongoing death and destruction. For her, the answer is clear. “Sometimes you wonder whether it’s appropriate… but these are exactly the things that inspire you and remind you that life is full of color, and all of those colors should be present at any time,” Domashchenko says. “Even in times as hard as these.”

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?

Decades after The Beatles reshaped global popular music, a highly anticipated new television drama exploring the band’s little-known formative years has entered production, with filming locations spanning two countries that shaped their earliest identity. Titled *Hamburg Days*, the six-part BBC One project centers on the era between 1960 and 1962, when the fledgling rock group played more than 250 chaotic, career-building shows in Hamburg, Germany’s bustling port city.

Unlike later Beatles content that focuses on the band’s legendary 1960s global superstardom, *Hamburg Days* spotlights the original lineup that many casual fans do not know well: it includes bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best, alongside young founding members John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The story draws its core inspiration from the memoirs of Klaus Voormann, a German artist and musician who collaborated closely with the band in later years — most famously designing the iconic cover art for their 1966 *Revolver* album, and even stepping in to play bass on select Beatles recordings.

The co-production between British and German entertainment firms will split filming between multiple key locations: Liverpool (the band’s lifelong hometown in northwest England), the northern German port of Hamburg, and Munich in southern Germany. Producers have framed the series as an intimate origin story, tracing how the young, scrappy group of British teenagers met Voormann and pioneering photographer Astrid Kirchherr — connections that would spark the artistic transformation that turned them into what would become the most influential music phenomenon in modern history.

Kirchherr, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 81, is widely credited with shaping The Beatles’ signature early visual identity, including the iconic mop-top hairstyle that became one of their most recognizable trademarks. She was also engaged to Sutcliffe, who left the band to pursue fine arts studies in Hamburg, only to die from a brain hemorrhage at just 21 years old in 1962, a devastating loss that left a lasting mark on the remaining band members. For his part, Best — who was famously ousted from the band by manager Brian Epstein in 1962, replaced by Ringo Starr — has previously spoken publicly about his shock at the abrupt dismissal, a moment the drama is expected to address with nuance.

The project boasts an acclaimed creative team. The script is penned by Wirral-born writer Jamie Carragher, who previously contributed to the award-winning HBO hit series *Succession*, while directing duties are split between Christian Schwochow, a veteran of Netflix’s *The Crown*, and German filmmaker Laura Lackmann. The newly announced cast features rising young performers: Rhys Mannion will lead as John Lennon, with Ellis Murphy as Paul McCartney, Harvey Brett as George Harrison, Louis Landau as Stuart Sutcliffe, and Patrick Gilmore as Pete Best. German actors round out the key creative roles, with Luna Jane portraying Astrid Kirchherr, Laura Tonke playing her mother Nielsa, and Casper von Bülow taking on the role of Klaus Voormann.

Cast members joined local officials from both Liverpool and Hamburg for a public event over the weekend, appearing at the opening of a new exhibition of never-before-seen Beatles letters in Hamburg. The gathering included Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram, who was in Hamburg for an official trade mission, and Hamburg state secretary Christoph Holstein.

*Hamburg Days* is not the only major Beatles biographical project currently in production: acclaimed director Sam Mendes is also working on a four-part feature film series about the band, which is on track to release in 2028, with a star-studded cast including Harris Dickinson as Lennon, Paul Mescal as McCartney, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as Harrison. For Liverpool, the arrival of the new drama cements the region’s growing status as a major UK production hub: in recent months, Merseyside has hosted more on-location shoots than any other UK region outside of London, with projects including *This City is Ours*, *The Cage*, and the iconic gangster series *Peaky Blinders* all filming there.