Eurovision 2026: five public broadcasters now boycott Vienna over Israel entry

Five public broadcasters — not three — will boycott the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 in Vienna when it opens on Tuesday May 12, 2026 with the first semi-final, continues on Thursday May 14 with the second, and concludes with the grand final on Saturday May 16. Spain's RTVE, Ireland's RTÉ, Slovenia's RTV Slovenia, the Netherlands' AVROTROS and Iceland's RÚV have all confirmed they will neither send delegations nor broadcast the final, after the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) ruled at a Geneva meeting on Thursday, December 4, 2025 that Israel's national broadcaster KAN can compete despite the war in Gaza.

The contest will go ahead with 35 participating delegations, after returning entrants Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania partly offset the five departures.

What the EBU actually decided

Approximately 50 broadcasters — including the BBC, host-country broadcaster ORF of Austria, Germany's ARD, the Nordic public broadcasters, France Télévisions, RAI of Italy, and the five eventual boycotters — attended the EBU's December 4 Geneva meeting. The agenda item was not a direct vote on Israel's participation, despite RTVE's months-long campaign for a secret ballot on exactly that question. Instead, members were asked to back new voting safeguards intended to discourage governments and third parties from organising mass voting campaigns for individual acts — a response to allegations, which Israel denies, that Tel Aviv orchestrated favourable public votes for Yuval Raphael at the 2025 contest in Basel.

The procedural mechanism, as BBC News reported, was decisive: agreeing to the new safeguards was coupled with an understanding that no separate vote would be held on Israel's continued eligibility. A "large majority" of members signed up. EBU's post-meeting statement: "This vote means that all EBU Members who wish to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 and agree to comply with the new rules are eligible to take part."

Martin Green, the Eurovision Song Contest director, said the debate had been "full, frank and honest and quite moving" and that members had concluded the contest "shouldn't be used as a political theatre, it must retain some sense of neutrality."

Why each broadcaster walked

The decisions, almost all confirmed within hours of the EBU vote, used distinct but overlapping language:

• Spain — RTVE. "The board of directors of RTVE agreed last September that Spain would withdraw from Eurovision if Israel was part of it... This withdrawal also means that RTVE will not broadcast the Eurovision 2026 final... nor the preliminary semi-finals." In a subsequent statement reported by The Independent, RTVE added that "the current events and the genocide currently taking place make it impossible for us to look the other way."
• Ireland — RTÉ. "Participation remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk."
• Slovenia — RTV Slovenia. Cited a September 2025 board position that, per The Independent's earlier reporting, was framed "on behalf of the 20,000 children who died in Gaza." RTV added: "The recent rule changes do not alter our view. As a public service broadcaster, RTV Slovenia is committed to upholding ethical principles and expects that equal rules and standards apply to all EBU members and all participating countries."
• Netherlands — AVROTROS. "Participation under the current circumstances is incompatible with the public values that are essential to us."
• Iceland — RÚV. Initially undecided on December 4 — RÚV signed the Nordic joint statement that supported the EBU's rule changes — but ultimately confirmed its own withdrawal in subsequent weeks, joining the boycott group, as catalogued by ESCXTRA and The Independent.

Why Spain is structurally the biggest exit

Spain's withdrawal carries weight that Ireland's, Slovenia's, the Netherlands' and Iceland's individually do not, for a reason rooted in Eurovision finance. The contest's so-called 'Big Five' — France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain — are the broadcasters that provide the largest financial contributions to the EBU, and in return their entries qualify automatically for the grand final without going through the semi-finals.

Newsorga's read: RTVE is the first 'Big Five' broadcaster ever to walk out of a modern Eurovision over a political dispute. Israel's disqualifications and withdrawals in past decades have been triggered by EBU scheduling clashes with Yom HaShoah or Yom Kippur, not by EBU-internal politics. Russia's post-2022 expulsion was an EBU decision, not a member-initiated boycott. The Spanish move sets a structural precedent for any future 'Big Five' broadcaster who wants to use the threat of withdrawal as leverage in EBU governance — and RTVE has already shown the playbook works publicly even when it does not change the underlying vote.

The EBU has not announced how, or whether, Spain's financial contribution and broadcast-rights position will be adjusted for 2026.

The Israeli view

Israeli President Isaac Herzog welcomed the EBU's decision in an X post the same day, calling it "an appreciated gesture of solidarity, brotherhood, and co-operation, symbolising a victory over those who seek to silence Israel and spread hatred," and added that Israel "deserves to be represented on every stage in the world."

KAN chief executive Golan Yochpaz framed the broader campaign for Israel's exclusion as a cultural boycott in its own right: "A boycott may begin today — with Israel — but no-one knows where it will end or who else it may harm. Is this what we truly want this contest to be remembered for on its 70th anniversary?"

Israel's 2025 entrant Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack at the Nova music festival, had finished second at the Basel contest in May 2025, behind Austrian winner JJ — whose victory is the reason Vienna is hosting in 2026. The voting controversy from that 2025 contest, which alleged that Israel mobilised mass public-vote campaigns through diaspora networks, was the proximate trigger for the EBU's new voting-safeguards push.

Who is still in

The final list, per the EBU's official Vienna 2026 all-participants page and confirmed by ESCXTRA on December 15, 2025, totals 35 countries. Returning to the contest after recent absences are Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania. The remaining 'Big Four' — France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom — plus host Austria receive automatic places in the grand final, as is standard practice; without Spain in the field, the auto-qualifier count for 2026 is therefore five, not six.

Germany's ARD, which had publicly threatened to leave the contest if Israel was removed, welcomed the EBU's decision: "We are looking forward to participating, embracing it as a celebration of cultural diversity and solidarity... At the same time, we deeply regret the decisions of individual EBU members to withdraw from the ESC 2026 but, of course, respect the choices made by the respective broadcasters."

The BBC said in a statement: "We support the collective decision made by members of the EBU. This is about enforcing the rules of the EBU and being inclusive."

What the boycott does and does not change

Practically, the contest will proceed in Vienna at the Wiener Stadthalle under host broadcaster ORF, with reduced national-jury contributions from the absent five but no broadcast-rights gap in their home markets that other distributors are likely to fill at scale. RTVE has publicly committed not to air the final in Spain, meaning Spanish viewers will have no domestic public-broadcaster feed for the first time in decades.

Politically, the boycott concentrates pressure on the EBU's governance model. Newsorga's read of the structural fault lines:

1. Two-tier membership tension. The EBU is a confederation of public broadcasters with very different relationships to their national governments. RTVE and RTV Slovenia have explicitly invoked government or board-level political positions in their decisions; the ARD position was likewise informed by German federal political sensitivities. The contest cannot remain "neutral cultural event" (per RTVE's framing) if state-level politics is the operative decision-maker on participation.

2. The voting-safeguards test. The EBU's new rules on third-party voting campaigns are now under real-world scrutiny for the first time at scale. If Vienna 2026 runs with no detected manipulation, the EBU can claim its 2025 reform worked; if controversy returns, the boycotters' case that rule-tinkering was a substitute for substantive action gains weight.

3. The 2027 calendar. The boycotting broadcasters have not pre-committed to returning in 2027. Newsorga expects each board to revisit the question once the Israel-Hamas conflict status and the political context shift; RTVE has the longest political distance to travel back, given its September 2025 board resolution explicitly tying participation to Israel's exclusion.

4. The 70th-anniversary framing. KAN's Yochpaz anchored his December statement on the anniversary year; 2026 is Eurovision's 70th edition since the inaugural 1956 contest in Lugano. A contest that loses Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Iceland on its 70th-anniversary year is now, structurally, the most politically contested edition of the modern era.

Bottom line. The question is no longer whether the boycott happens — it does. The question is whether the 2026 Vienna edition becomes the high-water mark of the dispute, or the start of a multi-year fissure in the EBU's founding promise that Eurovision stands outside national politics. Newsorga will track the broadcasts in Vienna for any onstage or off-stage protest, and the post-contest 2027 participation decisions through autumn 2026.