Dutch broadcast company AVROTROS has announced that the Netherlands will boycott the 2026 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is allowed to compete. The Netherlands is the fifth country to announce a planned boycott of the event, which is scheduled to be held in Vienna.
Countries are finally speaking up about this, I’ve been waiting for like, 2 years already.
Israel has undeniably brought the contest into disrepute twice in a row with them sending basically political entries with shady ad campaigns that made a select few voters disproportionately vote for Israel, causing them to spike up in the ranking (almost winning the 2025 contest; JJ is our savior), and yet the EBU just doesn’t even care about this? And when Russia did the whole “let’s take all of Ukraine” move, it took 10 countries to immediately speak up for them to get suspended. Ukraine won that year btw. Like… if the EBU are gonna keep saying the Eurovision Song Contest is “apolitical”, then they have to accept the harsh reality that making your participants be countries immediately makes it otherwise. And this is not the exception, it’s the norm. Both the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup have had similar disrepute incidents in the past, most notably with apartheid South Africa.
Either way, if more countries drop out due to Israel’s continued participate, that could ultimately result in enough awareness for the EBU to finally kick them out for good. Otherwise, the only solution is the privatization of their broadcaster, which literally nobody wants.
Also the commentator in the Israeli live broadcast called every artist who had called the war a genocide an anti-Semite on live tv. Yeah if the EBU wants their contest to stay apolitical than they need to ban the Israeli broadcaster for the commentator’s toxic comments.
This year in 2025, they even made fun of the Armenians. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was definitely something along the lines of “I can’t believe we gave these guys a quarter in Jerusalem”
I have ultimately lost faith in these commentators. So much for being an “independent reporter”, EBU. I mean yeah, they’re facing the threat of privatization, but for now they’re public and state-owned, so there’s literally no excuses here.
Countries are finally speaking up about this, I’ve been waiting for like, 2 years already.
Israel has undeniably brought the contest into disrepute twice in a row with them sending basically political entries with shady ad campaigns that made a select few voters disproportionately vote for Israel, causing them to spike up in the ranking (almost winning the 2025 contest; JJ is our savior), and yet the EBU just doesn’t even care about this? And when Russia did the whole “let’s take all of Ukraine” move, it took 10 countries to immediately speak up for them to get suspended. Ukraine won that year btw. Like… if the EBU are gonna keep saying the Eurovision Song Contest is “apolitical”, then they have to accept the harsh reality that making your participants be countries immediately makes it otherwise. And this is not the exception, it’s the norm. Both the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup have had similar disrepute incidents in the past, most notably with apartheid South Africa.
Either way, if more countries drop out due to Israel’s continued participate, that could ultimately result in enough awareness for the EBU to finally kick them out for good. Otherwise, the only solution is the privatization of their broadcaster, which literally nobody wants.
And FIFA and the IOC are repeating the same errors in 2026 and 2028
I mentioned both their competitions in my comment.
Also the commentator in the Israeli live broadcast called every artist who had called the war a genocide an anti-Semite on live tv. Yeah if the EBU wants their contest to stay apolitical than they need to ban the Israeli broadcaster for the commentator’s toxic comments.
This year in 2025, they even made fun of the Armenians. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was definitely something along the lines of “I can’t believe we gave these guys a quarter in Jerusalem”
I have ultimately lost faith in these commentators. So much for being an “independent reporter”, EBU. I mean yeah, they’re facing the threat of privatization, but for now they’re public and state-owned, so there’s literally no excuses here.