{"id":2188418,"date":"2025-12-05T18:58:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T18:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2188418"},"modified":"2025-12-05T18:58:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T18:58:25","slug":"eurovision-has-faced-political-boycotts-before-how-does-the-latest-compare-eurovision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/eurovision-has-faced-political-boycotts-before-how-does-the-latest-compare-eurovision\/","title":{"rendered":"Eurovision has faced political boycotts before \u2013 how does the latest compare? | Eurovision"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The decision by four European broadcasters to boycott next year\u2019s Eurovision<\/a> over Israel\u2019s inclusion is undoubtedly a watershed moment in the 70-year history of the song contest.<\/p>\n

One of the few genuinely popular, non-elitist and pan-European cultural events will be without Spain, one of the \u201cbig five\u201d nations in terms of financial contributions; Ireland, which has won the contest more times than any other country bar Sweden; the Netherlands<\/a>, a 1956 founding member; and Slovenia, symbolic of the EU\u2019s eastward enlargement.<\/p>\n

And with only a shaky ceasefire in Gaza, and Israel\u2019s broadcaster KAN showing no sign of retreating of its own accord, this may well be the state of play for some time to come.<\/p>\n

At the same time, political boycotts are anything but new to the world\u2019s largest live music event, whatever its organisers say about the competition\u2019s supposedly apolitical nature.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Greece missed out on witnessing the Dutch entry Teach-In winning Eurovision in 1975.<\/span> Photograph: United Archives \/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGreece and Turkey have boycotted the event, in 1975 and 1976 respectively, over Turkey\u2019s invasion of Cyprus,\u201d said Paul Jordan, a cultural historian who was part of the international jury for the French national selection for Eurovision<\/a> in 2019. Armenia refused to take part when the 2012 event was held in Baku, Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n

Ironically, it was Spain, whose broadcaster RTVE has been the most outspoken of the four boycotters, that was a target of the first boycott call in the competition\u2019s history. At Eurovision\u2019s ninth edition, in Copenhagen in 1964, a young Danish leftwing activist stormed the stage<\/a> with a placard that read \u201cBoycott Franco & Salazar\u201d, to protest against Spain and Portugal being allowed to compete in spite of them being run by military dictatorships.<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>A protester holds a placard that says \u2018Boycott Franco & Salazar\u2019 at the Eurovision song contest in Copenhagen in 1964<\/span> Photograph: Keystone Pictures USA\/Zuma Press\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Spain won Eurovision in 1968 and got to host the 1969 contest, which was boycotted in protest against the Franco regime by Austria \u2013 which will be the 2026 hosting nation and is one of the countries now most scandalised by the breakaway four\u2019s boycott.<\/p>\n

You might say all this means Spain\u2019s activist stance smacks of hypocrisy, or you could say the country is in a stronger position to gaze through the dry fog and glitter and see what Eurovision is really all about.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpain entered Eurovision just after it was blocked from joining the European Economic Community \u2013 it was about ending its ostracism and entering an elite club\u201d, said Duncan Wheeler, the chair of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds. \u201cIts own history in Eurovision has made it acutely aware of how pop culture can function as a soft power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the \u201cEuro\u201d in the title, some will ask what right Israel ever had to a starting place in the song contest in the first place. That would be to misunderstand the origins of Eurovision, which was never designed as a top-down vehicle for building a common European culture, but as a fairly mundane experiment in cross-border broadcasting that gained political meaning almost by accident.<\/p>\n

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Map<\/a><\/figure>\n

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One frequently overlooked fact is that not only Israel but also north African and other Middle Eastern countries including Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia are full members of the European Broadcasting Union, which organises the spectacle.<\/p>\n

Israel was the first to enter the contest, in 1973, but Morocco took part once, in 1980, when Israel withdrew due to a religious holiday falling on the same evening, and Lebanon was due to field a contestant in 2005 but withdrew its artist when told it would be required to broadcast the event in full, including the Israeli entry.<\/p>\n

You could say that these states have boycotted Eurovision over Israel\u2019s participation from the beginning, it\u2019s just they have been so consistent in their stance that barely anyone one has noticed.<\/p>\n

However, Ireland, Spain, Slovenia<\/a> and the Netherlands boycotting Eurovision does mark a turning point in Eurovision\u2019s history, and creates a problem that could take years to solve.<\/p>\n

But given that the song contest has so few genuine articles of faith that were intrinsic to its inception, its crisis may not be existential. Eurovision\u2019s values are the sum of those brought to the contest by participating nations. And whenever the boycotting four return, they may well inject it with a new lease of life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decision by four European broadcasters to boycott next year\u2019s Eurovision over Israel\u2019s inclusion is undoubtedly a watershed moment in the 70-year history of the song contest. One of the few genuinely popular, non-elitist and pan-European cultural events will be without Spain, one of the \u201cbig five\u201d nations in terms of financial contributions; Ireland, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2188419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2188418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Eurovision-has-faced-political-boycotts-before-\u2013-how-does-the.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2188418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2188420,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188418\/revisions\/2188420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2188419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2188418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2188418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2188418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}