Eurovision is “apolitical” but “is so big an event that it has a political impact,” a top official at the annual song contest’s organizer told POLITICO, adding that event managers are “prepared” for more disruptions during Saturday night’s final.
The grand finale of the Eurovision Song Contest, which is run each year by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), is taking place this time amid ratcheting tension over Israel’s participation — which has led five countries to stage a historic boycott of the 2026 contest.
“The EBU is not the European Union or the European Commission. We’re not the United Nations, so we don’t need to make any political decisions,” said Jean Philip De Tender, deputy director general at the EBU, an alliance of 113 public service media across 56 countries.
The countries sitting out this year’s 70th anniversary contest (Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland) say their decision is due to Israel’s war in Gaza — which was sparked by a violent attack on Israel by Hamas militants — and the resulting humanitarian crisis it has triggered.
De Tender said the EBU is “engaging with” and “listening to” those countries to try to get them “back on board next year.” But he said in the end the public broadcasters in those countries need to listen to their audiences and make their own decisions about participation.
Those calling for Israel’s exclusion from the song contest point to the fact that Russia was banned from the contest in 2022, just after it invaded Ukraine.
In a statement on X on Friday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said there “cannot be double standards” when it comes to Russia and Israel’s participation in the song contest.
“This year we will not be at Eurovision, but we will do so with the conviction of being on the right side of history. For consistency, responsibility, and humanity,” he said. “In the face of illegal war and also genocide, silence is not an option,” he added.
De Tender told POLITICO in Friday’s interview that the difference between Russia and Israel is that Russia’s public broadcaster is not considered to be independent from the government, which is why its EBU membership was suspended, and it cannot compete in Eurovision.
When the EBU announced Russia’s exclusion from Eurovision in 2022, the organizaation said it was to address concerns that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would “bring the competition into disrepute.”
On why the decision about the Russian broadcaster’s independence coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, De Tender told POLITICO that “things become more clear when a country is engaged in a conflict.”
“[That’s] when you see more explicitly whether you have independent news reporting or not. I think the war made that clear that that was not the case [for Russia’s broadcaster],” he said.
The situation with Israel is “totally different,” De Tender said, because Israeli public broadcaster KAN is sufficiently independent, and remains a full EBU member entitled to participate in Eurovision.
Speaking about the same alleged double standard on Wednesday, Martin Green, director of the Eurovision Song Contest, said Russia could “theoretically” be allowed to rejoin the competition if its broadcaster satisfied rules around independence.
The EBU has also overhauled the Eurovision voting system this year, following suggestions that the Israeli government unfairly influenced last year’s results through a mass voting campaign.
Israel’s public broadcaster KAN has said it was “not involved in any prohibited campaign intended to influence the results” of Eurovision, and has strongly pushed back against calls to recuse itself or be removed from the 2026 contest.
KAN CEO Golan Yochpaz told fellow EBU members in December that a “cultural boycott” of Israel could harm “freedom of creation and freedom of expression.”
“A boycott may begin today — with Israel — but no one knows where it will end or who else it may harm,” he said.
As protesters are expected to gather in the streets of Vienna on Saturday to oppose Israel’s participation in the contest, security will also be on high alert inside the venue.
During Israel’s performance in Tuesday’s semi-final, an audience member “loudly expressed their views,” and they were removed from the venue (along with three others) for “disruptive behavior,” the EBU and Austrian broadcaster ORF confirmed in a statement earlier this week.
De Tender said that during Saturday’s final the policy around broadcasting audience noise will remain the same.
“We will not hide away [from] any booing. … The sound level across the event and across all artists will remain the same.” He added that managers are “prepared” if anything similar happens during Saturday’s broadcast.
