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GENEVA<\/strong> \u2013 Organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest on Monday announced a final list of 35 countries that will take part in the glitzy pop-music gala next year, after five countries said they would boycott due to discord over Israel\u2019s participation. <\/p>\n Contest organizers announced the list for the 2026 finale, set to be held in Vienna in May, after five participants \u2014 Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain \u2014 earlier this month announced plans to sit it out.<\/p>\n A total of 37 countries took part this year, when Austria’s JJ won<\/a>. Three countries \u2014 Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania \u2014 will return, after skipping the event for artistic or financial reasons in recent years.<\/p>\n The walkout by some of the contest’s most stalwart and high-profile participants \u2014 Ireland shared the record of wins with Sweden \u2014 put political discord on center stage and has overshadowed the joyful, feel-good nature of the event. <\/p>\n Last week, the 2024 winner \u2014 non-binary singer Nemo of Switzerland<\/a>. who won with the pop-operatic ode \u201cThe Code.\u201d\u2014 announced plans to return the winner\u2019s trophy because Israel is being allowed to compete.<\/p>\n Organizers this month decided to allow Israel to compete, despite protests about its conduct of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza<\/a> and allegations that Israel manipulated the vote in favor of its contestants.<\/p>\n The European Broadcasting Union, a group of public broadcasters from 56 countries that runs the glitzy annual event, had sought to dispel concerns about vote-rigging \u2014 but the reforms announced weren’t enough to satisfy the holdouts. <\/p>\n The musical extravaganza draws more than 100 million viewers every year \u2014 one of the world’s most-watched programs \u2014 but has been roiled by the war in Gaza for the past two years, stirring protests<\/a> outside the venues<\/a> and forcing organizers to clamp down on political flag-waving<\/a>.<\/p>\n Experts say the boycott ahead of the event’s 70th anniversary amounts to one of the biggest crises the contest has faced, at a time when many public broadcasters face funding pressures and social media has lured away some eyeballs.<\/p>\n Israeli officials have hailed the decision by most EBU member broadcasters who supported its right to participate and warned of a threat to freedom of expression by embroiling musicians in a political issue. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\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.click2houston.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" GENEVA \u2013 Organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest on Monday announced a final list of 35 countries that will take part in the glitzy pop-music gala next year, after five countries said they would boycott due to discord over Israel\u2019s participation. Contest organizers announced the list for the 2026 finale, set to be held in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2199688,"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":[25172],"tags":[21741,22814],"class_list":["post-2199687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-world-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/35-countries-will-compete-in-next-years-Eurovision-Song-Contest.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199687","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=2199687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199689,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199687\/revisions\/2199689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2199688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2199687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2199687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2199687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}