It was meant to be the crowning moment of a seemingly never-ending success story: the 70th anniversary of the world’s biggest and ever-expanding live music event, held in a city steeped in history both dramatic and musical.
But as Vienna gears up to host this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which starts on Tuesday and culminates in Saturday’s grand final, euphoria will be hard to come by outside the power ballads performed onstage.
Due to boycotts over the inclusion of Israel, the musical extravaganza will take place without Ireland, the joint record-holder with most winning contributions, Spain and the Netherlands, traditionally Eurovision’s fifth and sixth largest financial contributors, and Slovenia and Iceland.
It is an unprecedented moment in the contest’s seven-decade history and could have long-term consequences for a spectacle under pressure to justify its costs in a time of cuts to public broadcasters.
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“In the long term, financing Eurovision is going to become harder and harder as publicly funded broadcasting is coming under attack everywhere across Europe,” said Irving Wolther, a cultural historian and long-running observer of the song contest. “In that context, the political rows don’t help, of course.”
The 2025 grand final in the Swiss city of Basle was watched by a record 166 million people across the globe, but last year’s three million year-on-year growth in viewing figures is likely to be annulled by the fact that this year’s contest is subject to a media blackout in some of the countries engaged in a boycott over Israel’s inclusion.
The finale will not be broadcast in Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, where just under 5.9 million viewers tuned into the spectacle in 2025. Instead, the Spanish broadcaster RTVE will screen its own musical special, while viewers in Ireland will be treated to an episode of the comedy Father Ted and those in Slovenia to a series of programmes about Palestine.
[ Eurovision 2026: When is it on, who is boycotting and could Israel win?Opens in new window ]
Viewing figures are also expected to be down in the Netherlands and Iceland, where national broadcasters are showing the event but have declined to submit their own musical contestants.
The three nations that are returning to Eurovision after skipping the event in recent years, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova, are unlikely to give the organising European Broadcasting Union (EBU) another televisual milestone to brag about.
The political row has rippled through the fan communities tied to the contest. One fan-site, Eurovision Hub, will not be covering the event, announcing at the end of last year that “we no longer feel aligned with the contest in its current state”.
“It feels like the build-up this year has been a little bit kind of an anticlimax,” said Paul Jordan, a historian of the song contest who said he had seen friendships forged through Eurovision love driven apart by the political row. “Eurovision is meant to be joyous. But this year it feels a little bit sad.”
The five breakaway nations announced their boycott last December, after Israel received the all-clear to compete before participating broadcasters were given a vote on its inclusion.
It brought to a climax a tense stand-off that had been brewing since the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023 and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. Critics accuse the EBU of double standards since Russia was barred from Eurovision in the aftermath of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In time for Eurovision’s 70th anniversary, the EBU recently announced the format’s expansion into the Asian market, with an inaugural Eurovision Song Contest Asia to take place in Bangkok, Thailand, on Saturday, November 14th.
For Vienna, Eurovision’s director, Martin Green, has promised a spectacular show that will celebrate the contest’s “unique ability to bring people together across borders and generations”. A new feature on the official Eurovision app will give diehard fans access to archival information including voting results and contestants spanning seven decades.
But it is questionable whether apolitical nostalgia will be the dominant mood on the streets of Vienna in the run-up to Saturday’s final. As well as the contest’s two semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday, the Austrian capital will host rallies both in support of and in protest against Israel’s participation.
About 3,000 protesters are expected for a rally at Resselpark on Friday to mark Palestinian Nakba Day, to honour the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
On the day of the grand finale itself, Vienna police said they were expecting about 3,000 people to take part in a protest march under the motto “Solidarity with Palestine”. A counterdemonstration entitled “12 points against anti-Zionism – for Israel’s participation at Eurovision” has been registered for 50 to 100 participants.
According to a recent survey for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, 26 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that the song contest “brought Europe more closely together”, while 52 per cent said hosting the event was too expensive for Austria.
At the last two editions, geopolitics has not just manifested itself in the form of protests around the contest’s venues, but also the songs being performed on stage.
In 2024, the Israeli contestant Eden Golan was cleared to compete by the EBU after changing the lyrics to her song Hurricane. Its original title, October Rain, was thought to reference the Hamas attacks of October 7th and had been barred for breaking rules on political neutrality.
The country’s 2025 contestant, Yuval Raphael, was a survivor of the Nova festival attack, and the lyrics of her power ballad New Day Will Rise appeared to reference her traumatic ordeal.
In both editions of the contest Israel performed strongly in the public vote, but the Israeli government’s heavy promotion of its acts through its social media channels prompted criticism.
Voting rule changes for the 2026 edition mean the maximum number of votes will be reduced from 20 to 10 per payment route, such as online, text message or phone call.
In Vienna, Israel will be represented by 28-year-old Noam Bettan. The announcement of his song, Michelle, initially prompted speculation that it could pay reference to Michelle Rukovicin, a female soldier who was heavily wounded in the October 7th attacks and left in a coma, but recovered and married her long-term partner last year.
The song’s actual lyrics, sung in French, Hebrew and English, make that theory sound far-fetched, however, dealing as it does with the performer’s “toxic love” to a woman he calls “the queen of problems”.
Bookmakers have Israel’s entry as fifth favourite, with Finland’s dramatic ballad Liekinheitin, by Linda Lampenius and Pete Parkkonen, leading the field. Other mooted winners include the Greek rapper Akylas’s bouncy party anthem Ferto and the Danish singer Søren Torpegaard Lund’s Før Vi Går Hjem.
The British entrant, Look Mum No Computer, is seen as having only an outside chance of winning, with his song Eins, Zwei, Drei priced at 80/1 with William Hill. – Guardian
