Eurovision in turmoil as countries stage boycott over Israel’s place in contest

The European Broadcasting Union cleared Israel to take part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, brushing aside demands for its exclusion and sparking an unprecedented backlash.

“A large majority of Members agreed that there was no need for a further vote on participation and that the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 should proceed as planned, with the additional safeguards in place,” the EBU said in a statement Thursday.

Following the decision, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia said they disagreed with the EBU and announced they would not participate in the 70th-anniversary Eurovision in Vienna because Israel was allowed to take part.

The boycotting countries said their decision was based on Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis, as they launched a historic boycott that plunges Eurovision into its deepest-ever crisis.

“Culture unites, but not at any price,” Taco Zimmerman, general director of Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS, said Thursday. “Universal values such as humanity and press freedom have been seriously compromised, and for us, these values are non-negotiable.”

On the other side of the debate, Germany had warned it could pull out of the contest if Israel was not allowed to take part.

Before the voting took place, Golan Yochpaz, a senior Israeli TV executive, said the meeting was “the attempt to remove KAN [Israeli national broadcasters] from the contest,” which “can only be understood as a cultural boycott.”

Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ said it “feels that Ireland’s participation remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk.”

Spanish radio and television broadcaster RTVE said it had lost trust in Eurovision. RTVE President José Pablo López said that “what happened at the EBU Assembly confirms that Eurovision is not a song contest but a festival dominated by geopolitical interests and fractured.”

The EBU in Geneva also agreed on measures to “curb disproportionate third-party influence, including government-backed campaigns,” and limited the number of public votes to 10 “per payment method.” RTVE called the change “insufficient.”

Controversy earlier this year prompted the changes, when several European broadcasters alleged that the Israeli government had interfered in the voting — after Israel received the largest number of public votes during the final.

The EBU has been in talks with its members about Israel’s participation since the issue was raised at a June meeting of national broadcasters in London.

Eurovision is run by the EBU, an alliance of public service media with 113 members in 56 countries. The contest has long proclaimed that it is “non-political,” but in 2022, the EBU banned Russia from the competition following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people in Israel, a large majority of whom were civilians, and taking 251 hostages. The attack prompted a major Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them civilians, displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population and destroyed wide areas.

The ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump in October 2025 led to the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages.

Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this report.