A short history of politics and boycotts at Eurovision

Last year, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain decided to boycott the 2026 Eurovision song contest. That was after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the competition, decided to allow Israel to compete, with the head of Spain’s state broadcaster saying “the genocide currently taking place make[s] it impossible for us to look the other way”.

Late last year, hundreds gathered outside SBS’s Melbourne headquarters, calling on them to join the boycott. SBS has refused, claiming that “Eurovision was created to bring people and cultures together through music” and that “making a decision to be involved based on the inclusion or exclusion of any country would undermine SBS’s editorial independence and impartiality”.

Australia’s contestant Delta Goodrem had a very similar take, as highlighted by ETTE Media, saying she wanted to “[stay] true to my belief in the love of music and the power of music” after ABC Sydney’s Hamish Macdonald said he wouldn’t “put her on the spot” about the “complex geopolitics of Eurovision”.

Excluding Israel would not be unprecedented – the EBU announced that Russia would no longer be allowed to participate three days after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, as its inclusion “would bring the competition into disrepute”.

Implicitly, SBS’s decision relies on the idea that Eurovision is an apolitical competition, a space about music and cultural connection outside the context of the world around it. But this idea ignores the competition’s history intertwined with the politics of the continent that it’s named after.

The EBU was created in 1950 after Western and Eastern European countries failed to agree on terms for a truly international broadcasting organisation. It excluded Eastern Europe (with the sole exception of Yugoslavia), but included the then-French colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia – a geographic definition that would later enable Israel’s entry into the EBU.

Eurovision came six years later, billed as a way to bond Europe together after the horrors of the Second World War, but also serving as an instrument of Western Europe’s cultural power in the burgeoning Cold War – promoting the image of a technologically advanced, peaceful and glamorous West.

The first calls for a boycott came in 1964, during the eighth edition of the contest. A young Danish left-wing activist stormed the stage holding a banner reading “Boycott Franco and Salazar”; the dictators then in charge of Spain and Portugal. When Spain hosted the competition five years later, Austria did exactly that, refusing to participate.

Greece withdrew from the contest in 1975 in protest of Turkey’s Eurovision debut, as did Turkey the next year after Greece entered “Panaghia mou” (My homeland), a song about Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus.

Eurovision became even more political after the revolutions of 1989 and the entry of Eastern European countries into the competition, particularly those that had once been part of the Soviet Union.

In 2004, Ukrainian singer Ruslana won with her song “Wild Dances”, propelling her to global fame. Within months, she became an international face of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, which succeeded in overturning the rigged 2004 election, and was elected to Ukraine’s parliament.

In 2009, after Russia invaded Georgia, the latter refused to participate in Eurovision after their entry “We Don’t Wanna Put In”, a thinly veiled reference to Russian then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, was disallowed for being too political.

Ukraine has won the competition two more times since 2004, in 2016 with the song “1944” and in 2022 with “Stefania”, both widely seen as rebukes of Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory.

But the most controversial part of the competition has long been the inclusion of Israel.

Israel became the first non-European country to participate in the competition in 1973, prompting an almost-complete boycott of the competition from Arab countries. Tunisia planned to participate in 1977 but withdrew to avoid broadcasting Israeli content. The same happened with Lebanon in 2005. Morocco became the only Arab country to participate in 1980, one of the few times Israel has been absent from the competition.

When Israel hosted Eurovision in 2019, a large group of European artists joined the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in calling for a boycott over Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. Israel’s Eurovision broadcast included tourism advertisements showcasing the illegally-occupied Golan Heights and West Bank as part of Israel, despite Palestinians living in those areas being barred from attending the competition.

Israel has increasingly used the competition as a diplomatic tool, spending millions campaigning for its entries and having politicians including Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, make explicit endorsements. A recent New York Times investigation detailed how heavily this can skew national vote totals, prompting doubts about the integrity of the competition.

With a UN Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International and others finding Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, its already controversial participation has been brought to a head: this is the largest boycott in Eurovision’s history.

Time will tell if the song contest can survive this kind of pressure, or if more countries will join Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, and Iceland in exiting the competition before the curtains open for Eurovision’s 2027 edition.