The 2026 Eurovision contest opened last week in Vienna with only 35 competing countries, the lowest number since 2004.
Five national broadcasters, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Slovenia, boycotted over Israel’s participation. Tickets for Saturday’s grand final remain unsold, something organisers describe as unheard of. The atmosphere, by the accounts of fans who have attended for years, feels flat in a way that goes beyond the usual political friction Eurovision absorbs and moves on from.
The New York Times investigation, based on previously undisclosed voting data, internal EBU documents, and interviews with more than 50 people, traced Israel’s involvement back to at least 2018, when the government spent over $100,000 promoting its entry on social media. Israel won that year. According to former Eurovision songwriter Doron Medalie, that victory convinced Israeli leaders the contest was worth investing in seriously.
By the 2024 contest in Malmö, the government had poured more than $800,000 into Eurovision-related advertising, with funds from Netanyahu’s overseas propaganda unit specifically earmarked for vote promotion.
The Campaign Started Earlier
The central finding is not merely that Israeli actors tried to rally votes.
It is that the effort was wider, more organised, and longer-running than previously known. Under Eurovision’s previous rules, one person could vote up to 20 times, meaning a few hundred people could meaningfully shift a national result. The EBU cut the maximum to ten votes per viewer after the investigation’s findings circulated, but issued no audit of past results. Eurovision director Martin Green’s public response was to call the piece “a rehash” and describe it as a story about “who did not win.” That deflection did not reassure the broadcasters who had already been given only a summary, not the full findings, of an internal review commissioned after the 2025 contest.
The EBU’s own internal divisions are part of the story. At a broadcaster meeting in London last July, Spain called for a debate on Israel’s participation and changes to the voting system. Instead of launching a formal investigation, Eurovision hired a veteran Czech broadcasting executive to interview members. Broadcasters were later given only a summary of his findings. Germany and Estonia opposed removing Israel; several others threatened to withdraw if it stayed, and some followed through. The EBU president described the decision not to hold a direct vote on Israel’s participation as “the most democratic solution possible.” Belgium’s public broadcaster accused the EBU of hiding behind guidelines instead of openly discussing human rights concerns.
A Contest Straining Its Own Rules
Eurovision’s rules were built for a softer era.
They can manage stagecraft, sponsorship, and voting procedure more easily than they can manage coordinated political influence wrapped in the language of audience mobilisation. Israel’s entry this year, Noam Bettan, received a formal EBU warning after his team circulated posts urging viewers to vote for him the maximum ten times, which organisers said was not in line with the rules or spirit of the contest. Green confirmed the warning. He also insisted such campaigns cannot affect results, a position that sits awkwardly against the EBU’s simultaneous refusal to release full televoting data or commission an independent audit.
The broader consequence is that other countries have begun running similar diaspora mobilisation campaigns, having watched Israel’s approach go largely unchallenged for years. Once that threshold is crossed, the contest’s old distinction between culture and politics collapses quickly. Eurovision has always contained geopolitics. What has changed is the sense of sustained state-linked strategy, backed by documented government spending, rather than ordinary fan enthusiasm.
Camp Cannot Carry Everything
Eurovision has survived political scandal before and will probably survive this one. Its reach is still vast, its ritual unusually durable. But durability is not the same as innocence. The more the event becomes useful for governments trying to recast themselves through spectacle, the harder it becomes to defend its brand of harmless extravagance.
The music can still be absurd, brilliant, gaudy, and sincere all at once. That part has not changed. What has changed is the burden placed on the vote. Eurovision no longer needs only a winning song. It needs a public that still believes the contest belongs more to audiences than to states. In Vienna this week, that belief is harder to sustain than it has ever been.
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