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Why Eurovision's fallout over Israel may change the competition forever
Moments after Austria overtook Israel to win last May's Eurovision Song Contest and in doing so won the right to host this year's event, UK viewers heard commentator Graham Norton say organisers "will be breathing the largest sigh of relief that they're not faced with a Tel Aviv final next year".
Anti-Israel protests had built ahead of the contest. At a demonstration of several hundred people in Basel, Switzerland, where the final was held, protesters wore the Palestinian flag and smeared themselves with fake blood to symbolise the killings in Gaza. During the grand final the Israeli singer Yuval Raphael was targeted when two people attempted to storm the stage, and threw paint which ended up hitting a Eurovision crew member.
The atmosphere in the arena as the results came in was easily the most tense I've experienced in my years of reporting on the song contest. People were praying. Some were crying. There were chants of "Austria, Austria" as the audience awaited the final scores.
If many in the crowd didn't appear to want Israel to win, the public vote showed a different perspective. Yuval Raphael, who received middling points from the competition's judges, outperformed every other participant when it came to the public vote.
A number of broadcasters subsequently queried Israel finishing so highly. They pointed to the fact that official social media accounts linked to Israel's government, including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had been asking people to vote for its representative 20 times, the maximum the contest allowed.
Their implication was that the public vote result was less a reflection of widespread public support for Raphael, and more the product of some people voting for Israel as many times as they could.
The Israeli government itself has frequently claimed it faces a global smear campaign.
Some broadcasters wanted an audit. There were calls to review the voting system, which had been in place for many years, to ensure that, in the words of Flemish public broadcaster VRT, it could guarantee "a fair reflection of the opinion of viewers and listeners".
In response, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises the event, confirmed the vote had been independently checked and verified, and there was no evidence that voting up to 20 times "disproportionally affects [sic] the final result", later clarifying it was "a valid and robust result".
The near victory for Israel, which first entered the contest in 1973 and has won it four times, brought to boiling point what for many years had been a simmering backstage dispute over the influence of geopolitics and conflict on Eurovision voting.
The Eurovision Song Contest is now facing its biggest boycott in its 70-year history.
While 35 countries are participating in the 2026 contest, broadcasters from Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia have withdrawn from this week's event in opposition to Israel's inclusion.
Their precise reasons for doing so vary and are not always explicit. Some say they are boycotting the 2026 contest in protest at the military offensive in Gaza that began in 2023 and has seen more than 72,000 people killed, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. Israel's offensive began after the militant group Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Some broadcasters have also accused Israel's government of genocide, which Israel strongly denies.
It's notable that most of the boycotting broadcasters are in broad alignment with the policies of their governments. Some are from countries where governments have explicitly and strongly criticised the state of Israel. Last month, politicians from Spain, Slovenia and Ireland tried and failed to push the European Union to suspend the bloc's preferential trade relations with Israel. The broadcasters insist they came to their own independent decisions.
Previously, a handful of broadcasters had publicly raised concerns around Israel's inclusion since the start of the offensive but none had withdrawn from the 2024 or 2025 contests.
As calls for a boycott grew, Miki Zohar, Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports said: "The Eurovision Song Contest is a celebration of music, culture and brotherhood between nations, not a platform for scoring political points." He described a potential boycott as "shameful and hypocritical".
Politics has arguably always been at the heart of Eurovision voting; with closely linked nations frequently giving each other points in the public vote.
But some broadcasters feel that despite the EBU saying last year's event was a fair vote, Israel's presence and the alleged voting patterns that go with it are making it impossible for Eurovision to be a genuine contest of music popularity.
Such is the strength of feeling around what some feel happened last year, there are some who now argue that while geopolitics affecting voting is one thing, no country that is at war should be allowed in the song contest. They would go so far as to exclude Ukraine in order to protect what they see as the integrity of Eurovision voting.
So does Eurovision need to re-write its rule book for the world's most-watched entertainment show? Or does doing so risk creating more problems than it resolves?
Eurovision is a competition not between governments but one involving members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), a community of public service broadcasters including the United Kingdom's BBC whose primary function is to share footage of news events. Over many decades, EBU membership has spread beyond the continent. The contest's slogan is "united by music".
This current boycott therefore is not between countries but by independent broadcasters over Israel's - or specifically the Israeli public broadcaster Kan's - participation.
For its part, Eurovision has never been completely free from politics. The competition describes its own values of "universality, inclusivity and celebrating diversity" as one that will "resonate with audiences in participating countries."
The author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, Dr Dean Vuletic, says that historically, entry into the song contest has been used by some countries to signal an end to their international isolation or demonstrate their pro-Western credentials.
He says this goes back "to 1961 when we had the debut of Franco's Spain, but also Tito's Yugoslavia, which was the only eastern European country to participate during the Cold War because it was non-aligned."
Conflicts between nations have also played out in Eurovision before, but the fallout has often been temporary and regionally contained. In 1975 Greece boycotted because of Turkey's invasion of Cyprus, and the following year Turkey didn't take part. And in 2012 Armenia refused to take part in neighbouring Azerbaijan because of tensions over the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Lebanon was due to make its debut in 2005, but its laws made it nearly impossible to show Israel's performance so it withdrew when the EBU confirmed it had to televise the whole show. The only year Morocco entered was 1980, a year Israel didn't compete, and it's widely accepted that was the reason the country's broadcaster only took part then.
With this year's boycott, there's now a broader question of whether the EBU is capable of preventing geopolitics taking over the competition.
We received a lot of protests from Eurovision fans who said we shouldn't be on the stage together with Israel," Natalija Gorščak, president of the management board of the Slovenian broadcaster RTV, tells me. "Our ethical stand as a public service broadcaster should be to fight for peace.
Iceland's broadcaster RÚV, ahead of announcing its boycott, said it had "serious doubts about the conduct of both the Israeli public broadcaster and the Israeli government" when it came to competition rules. The Dutch broadcaster Avrotros cited "political interference" in the 2025 contest and said its participation would go against "public values that are fundamental to our organisation."
It could be argued the five boycotting broadcasters are themselves using the contest for political purposes to send a message directly to the Israeli government. Two are now on record questioning Ukraine's future too, and officials from participating broadcasters across the continent are privately saying similar things.
Broadcasters and artists participating in this year's show are prevented from speaking publicly about anything which could bring the contest into disrepute.
Yuval Raphael was chosen to represent Israel having survived the Nova music festival when it was attacked by Hamas gunmen during the 7 October attack on Israel. She hid under a pile of bodies for hours before being rescued and performed with shrapnel from the attack still inside her leg. The EBU confirmed the artist met all entry requirements including being non-political.
The song was not directly political, but it was symbolic, and the performer was symbolic," Gorščak believes. "We still think it was political, even if by the rules of the EBU it was not political.
The social media posts from Israeli government-linked accounts were within the rules, and politicians from other nations also encouraged votes for their nation's entry, but critics argue that the scale of Israel's involvement was different and made it an outlier.
The EBU has attempted to address concerns raised by Gorščak and other executives by reducing the maximum votes per viewer to 10 this year. The union said it would also "discourage disproportionate promotion campaigns… particularly when undertaken or supported by third parties, including governments or governmental agencies".
However, over the weekend the Israeli broadcaster Kan was given a formal warning by the EBU which said: "it was brought to our attention that videos with an on-screen instruction to 'vote 10 times for Israel' had been published and released" by this year's Israeli representative Noam Bettan.
Ahead of the event beginning on Tuesday, organisers asked Kan to remove the content from social media platforms, which the broadcaster acted on. Eurovision said it believed the posts weren't in "the spirit of the competition", and said it "will continue to monitor any promotional activities carefully and take appropriate action where needed."
Some trace the current heightened tensions back to the decision in February 2022 to expel Russia from Eurovision following its invasion of Ukraine. At the time the EBU concluded a Russian entry would "bring the competition into disrepute" after it consulted widely among its membership. There is currently no Russian broadcaster that is in the EBU.
The Ukrainian all-male group Kalush Orchestra, who were given permission to leave their country under martial law to compete at Eurovision, went on to receive the highest number of public points in the event's history, winning in the final moments of the 2022 contest, pushing the UK's Sam Ryder into second place.
Ukraine's victory was widely celebrated and Eurovision says there was nothing in its 2022 entry that went against the competition's rules. But Slovenia's RTV felt many people had voted for Ukraine as an act of political solidarity and in its view, this undermined the purity of Eurovision as a song contest.
"It is political and we think it shouldn't have happened," Gorščak says. "Political activism in that way, we shouldn't tolerate that. I think this is not OK, it's not also fair. If you're a victim, everybody would vote for you. To the performer from the UK who is great but then they are not chosen, why? Because there is a victimised representative of the victimised country.
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. This is the debate I think we need to have within Eurovision.
Gorščak's opinion that no artist from a country at war should be allowed to enter is something the Spanish broadcaster also appears to hold. Speaking at a parliamentary hearing in February this year, RTVE's chair José Pablo López said: "We should open a serious debate once and for all… for the reform of the EBU's statutes so that countries in conflict cannot participate in the next Eurovision Song Contest."
Members last year agreed to continue with the 70-year rule that any EBU member is eligible to participate in the song contest, meaning both Israel and Ukraine can send a representative.
Even so, I am told other broadcasters are making similar points to those from Slovenia and Spain, especially over concerns supporters of both Ukraine and Israel are voting en masse and repeatedly for the artists representing those countries.
"A country from a conflict creates a bigger one for the contest," a respected senior figure from a non-boycotting broadcaster tells me. "Things need to be fixed for an equal ground because currently there isn't any".
However, some say this line of argument is inherently unfair. Dana International, who won the contest for Israel in 1998, posted online: "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."
Kan has previously said if it were to be disqualified it "could have wide-ranging implications for the competition and the values for which the EBU stands" and it would be "especially troubling ahead of the 70th edition of the song contest, which was founded as a symbol of unity, solidarity, and fellowship." A source at the broadcaster asserted it has not broken EBU rules and thus there should be no question over its continued involvement.
And in the past 18 months, the EBU has defended the Israeli broadcaster Kan against "sustained political attack [from its own government], facing threats that not only jeopardise its independence but its very existence in the future".
Israel's Communications minister Shlomo Karhi has said proposed reforms reflect there no longer being the same need for publicly funded broadcasting as there once was.
Eurovision officials say it has "for 70 years provided a platform for displaying the importance of peace and unity in a divided world" but what's now apparent is some broadcasters no longer feel the world's most-watched entertainment show is a fair competition.
Insiders from multiple broadcasters claim it's been more challenging this year to find musicians to take part. There's a consistent suggestion it's because acts are worried about potential reputational damage as Eurovision becomes increasingly divisive.
As final preparations take shape for this week's 70th song contest in Vienna, Eurovision now finds itself yet again unable to focus entirely on the songs, the pyrotechnics, the staging, the choreography, the glitter, the fun and the parties. Instead, for another year, it is faced with more petitions and protests.
The rules state the competition cannot be used "as a platform or forum for political expression, activism, controversy or the promotion of external causes or agendas" but going forward the question is what kind of singing competition Eurovision becomes if more countries, broadcasters, artists and viewers, see it not as a celebration above politics, but as one shaped by them.
Top image credit: Getty Images
BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. Emma Barnett and John Simpson bring their pick of the most thought-provoking deep reads and analysis, every Saturday. Sign up for the newsletter here
Source: BBC
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