Eurovision Song Contest organizers said Friday that member broadcasters will vote in November on whether Israel can participate in the musical extravaganza next year, as calls have mounted for the country to be excluded over the war in Gaza.
According to spokesperson Dave Goodman, the board of the European Broadcasting Union, which brings together public broadcasters and runs the event, has sent a letter to members indicating the vote will take place at an extraordinary general meeting held online in early November.
The vote will be on whether Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster and member of the EBU, will participate, Goodman said in an email. An “absolute majority” in the vote would be required for an exclusion to pass, he said.
Countries including Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain have threatened not to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest unless Israel is excluded from the competition over the war in Gaza.
Germany and Austria have backed Israel’s participation. Other national broadcasters, including the BBC, have not yet made a decision.
Kan, the Israeli broadcaster, wrote Thursday on X that it hoped the contest “will continue to uphold its cultural and non-political identity.”
Regional, political rivalries
Eurovision is a competition in which performers from countries across Europe, and a few beyond it, compete under their national flags with the aim of being crowned continental champion — a sort of Olympics of pop music.
It’s also a place where politics and regional rivalries play out.
In 2024, organizers told Israel to change the lyrics and name of its entry, originally titled October Rain, in apparent reference to Hamas’s cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed some 1,200 Israelis and triggered the war. The song was renamed Hurricane and Israeli singer Eden Golan was allowed to remain in the contest.
Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests have also taken place at Eurovision in the past two years of the competition.
The vote on Israel’s participation “is one of the biggest crises that Eurovision has ever faced, because it has the potential to really cement division within the organization,” said Dean Vuletic, an expert on the history of Eurovision.
Vuletic noted past exclusions of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s (due to U.N. sanctions as war in the Balkans was raging) and more recently those of Belarus in 2021 (after the country submitted two songs that violated competition rules about political themes) and Russia in 2022 (over its full-scale war in Ukraine). For its part, Russia has since rebooted its own international song competition called Intervision, and the final took place last weekend.
Front Burner25:14Eurovision’s charged political history
Last week, Austria’s Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger expressed concern that some countries were considering a boycott of the 2026 event in her country, insisting the contest was “not an instrument for sanctions.”
She wrote on X that she had written to European colleagues with an appeal to find ways to “improve the situation in Israel and Gaza” together.
The Eurovision Song Contest 2026 will take place in May in Vienna. The honour of hosting is granted to the winner of the previous year.
This year’s winner in Basel, Switzerland, was Austria’s JJ for the song Wasted Love.
