At the Eurovision Song Contest, one rule stands above all others: no politics.
That order is enforced by the competition’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, an opaque federation of nearly 70 public service broadcasters, based in Geneva. It scrutinizes performers’ lyrics, their outfits and even their stage props in hopes of bringing some Swiss neutrality to the contest and avoiding anything controversial that could spoil the fun.
Yet when the Eurovision final takes place this Saturday on the European Broadcasting Union’s home turf in Basel, Switzerland, politics will still be bubbling in the background, even if the organizers manage to keep such topics off the stage.
At a time when the effects of Israel’s war in Gaza are still rippling through cultural life, and Russia and Belarus are pariahs because of the invasion of Ukraine, the question of who gets to compete in Eurovision brings politics to the fore. And the question of what is actually political can be, slippery, and one for which the European Broadcasting Union sometimes lacks a consistent answer.
In recent weeks, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have called for a debate on Israel’s participation, rehashing a furor that threatened to overshadow last year’s competition. Before the last final, in Malmo, Sweden, some Eurovision performers signed petitions and made statements calling for Israel’s exclusion because of its actions in Gaza. Some crowd members booed Israel’s singer during the final, though others cheered.
Eurovision officials responded with a line that the competition has clung to at previous moments of tension: Eurovision, it said, is a contest between broadcasters, not nations. That means a government’s actions should have no bearing on the contest.
This year, the European Broadcasting Union issued a code of conduct requiring all performers and their teams to refrain from “making political statements or causing controversies.” It also appointed Martin Green, a British events producer who worked on the ceremonies at the 2012 London Olympics, to oversee the competition and act as a spokesman if trouble arises.
“Mistakes were made last year, and we’ve all learned from them,” Green said in an interview, adding that Eurovision now had a “fine line to tread.” But ultimately, he said, it was “a prime-time family TV show” whose viewers would be turned off by politics.
The European Broadcasting Union’s activities are wider than just Eurovision: It has about 500 staff members who lobby governments on behalf of its broadcasters and advise broadcasters on the impact of new technologies, like A.I. Its board and general assembly, neither of which publish minutes of their meetings, oversee those activities, as well as Eurovision.
Because the public broadcasters of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain pay the most toward funding Eurovision, those “big five” nations automatically qualify for the competition final.
Sarah Yuen, Eurovision’s executive supervisor for the 2003 contest, said that, backstage, Eurovision was like “the United Nations of television,” and was never free of diplomatic disputes or patriotic peacocking.
Onstage “every country in the contest is always trying to show it’s more important than the next one,” Yuen said. Some national delegations also jockey behind the scenes for the best conditions for their acts, she added.
In the competition’s early decades, after it was founded in 1956, politics weren’t such an issue onstage, but often colored the voting to choose the winner. In addition to a public telephone vote, juries representing each nation allocate points, often trading top scores with friendly, diplomatically aligned nations.
That could sometimes make the count feel like a proxy for foreign affairs, but it was only in recent decades that geopolitical conflicts began threatening to spill over onto the stage. In 2009, for instance, the European Broadcasting Union demanded that Georgia alter its entry — a disco song called “We Don’t Wanna Put In” — because it sounded like a reference to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, just months after Georgia and Russia had fought a brief war. (Georgia refused, and pulled out of that year’s competition.)
Last year, the union asked Israel to change the title and some lyrics of its entry, “October Rain,” because it appeared to be about grief over the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. The song was retitled “Hurricane,” and some of its verses were altered.
During the recent interview, Green struggled to explain how the organization decides whether lyrics are political. “It’s very hard to be black-and-white,” he said, after a long pause, then added that the test was whether an act seemed like they were trying to “instrumentalize the contest.”
The challenge of keeping politics at bay moved well beyond lyrics in 2021, when Belarus began a clampdown on antigovernment protests. The European Broadcasting Union’s board decided to suspend Belarus’s state broadcaster — meaning it could no longer compete in Eurovision — over what it called “exceptional” government interference in the broadcaster’s operations.
Then, in 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The union initially stuck to its line that Eurovision is “a nonpolitical cultural event” between broadcasters, not nations. But this split the organization’s membership, according to interviews with 11 current and former members of the union’s Eurovision committees.
Sietse Bakker, a television producer who was a delegate for the Dutch public broadcaster, said that most members wanted Russia thrown out of Eurovision. But a minority insisted that doing so would politicize the contest and could lead to debates about other broadcasters’ participation.
Sebastian Sergei Parker, a former Russian TV executive who sat on the union’s board, recalled a senior European Broadcasting Union official saying that expelling Russia would “open a Pandora’s box.”
After initially saying Russia could stay in, the union changed tack and barred it from Eurovision, suspending all its members, too. Bakker said that he believed this should not be seen as a political decision, because war was a humanitarian issue that went beyond politics. Yet ever since, activists who want Israel out of Eurovision cite Russia’s exclusion as a precedent.
Other countries have left Eurovision of their own accord, for reasons that could also be viewed as political. Turkey has not participated since 2013, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the show undermines family values by featuring gay, transgender and nonbinary performers. Hungary, whose government has also cracked down on L.B.G.T. rights, including by banning pride events, has not taken part since 2019.
Green said that Eurovision did not consider featuring gay or trans performers as a political act, and that the competition was a place for performers to celebrate their identity onstage, whatever their race, gender or sexual orientation.
For countries that don’t share those values, there may soon be an alternative. According to the Tass state news agency in Russia, Putin signed a decree in February promising to revive a rival Cold War-era song contest called Intervision that would now also include artists from India, China and Brazil. Russia’s culture ministry did not respond to a request for further details on the competition, but the existence of two ideologically distinct pop contests would only increase perceptions of Eurovision as a political event.
Green said that the competition’s online audience was growing, which showed that the European Broadcasting Union’s apolitical stance was the right one. Viewers wanted to enjoy Eurovision “for what it is,” he said: a fun singing contest between “37 countries.” Then, he corrected himself: Eurovision was a contest between “37 broadcasters,” not nations, he said. Sometimes even those who work for the union can forget.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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