Eurovision: The song contest that broke the continent

I have watched Eurovision every year for nearly 20 years. This year was supposed to be my 15th anniversary of hosting a party. 

I genuinely, unironically loved it. I loved it for the songs and the voices, but I also deeply subscribed to its founding values: the idea that a continent still scarred by two world wars could come together through a shared appreciation for music.

This year, instead of hosting my party, I have been unable to ignore the story that now dominates the contest.

Eurovision was born in 1956 from a specific wound: Europe had just finished destroying itself. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) created the contest as an act of almost naive faith: the belief that culture could do what politics had failed to do, by building something that felt genuinely continental and shared. 

For nearly seven decades, that faith held. It survived the Cold War, the Balkan crisis and Brexit. The contest bent, but it never broke.

In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the EBU moved with admirable speed. Within hours, Russia was out. There was no lengthy deliberation, no consultation process, no months of hand-wringing about the separation of music and politics.

Nonsensical position

Since October 2023, Israel’s military assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. The International Court of Justice has found it plausible that genocide is being committed, and UN agencies have described the use of mass starvation as a weapon of war.

Several European governments - including those whose broadcasters fund and run Eurovision - have described Israel’s conduct as a violation of international law.

Meanwhile, a national poll in the UK found that 82 percent of Britons think Israel should not be allowed to compete in Eurovision. Polls in Norway, the Netherlands, France and Sweden all returned similar results.  

As for the EBU? We’ve had statements about “core values”, but even as fans protest and politicians debate - with Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland ultimately boycotting the contest - it has done nothing but insist that Israel’s participation is a matter of broadcasting rules, not ethics.

This is a nonsensical position from the same institution that rightly found the political will to exclude Russia. It has spent the past two years constructing increasingly elaborate and incoherent arguments for why it cannot apply the same logic to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

What it tells you is not primarily about Eurovision. The contest is merely a reflection of a continent that is running out of principles for which it is willing to pay a price.

The Russia exclusion was, from a European perspective, relatively costless. Russia has become a pariah; the political winds were clear, the cultural consensus near-total.

Excluding Netanyahu’s Israel would be different. It would require confronting the foreign policy architecture of the postwar order, relations with the US, and the internal divisions within European governing coalitions. It would require European institutions to say, plainly, that rules are rules and they apply to everyone.

Shared humanity

All week in Vienna, I have watched EBU officials sidestep questions in the media centre with the practiced fluency of people who have decided that stonewalling is a communications strategy.

I have watched delegations from countries whose own broadcasters have withdrawn - forced out by their moral clarity - being told how much they’re missed and how their opinions are respected. But there is no serious debate here.

What I keep coming back to is this: the people who built Eurovision after the Second World War understood something that the people running it now seem to have forgotten. The artists and voices are often jaw-dropping, but the contest was always about much more than the music.

It was about the wager that shared humanity - a word repeatedly used in Vienna to shuffle away from talking politics - could be made tangible. If enough people watch the same thing and feel something together, you could gradually create the conditions for peace.

That wager required good faith, and it required the institution at the centre to be trustworthy. I suppose 69 years is a decent run, but the EBU is no longer trustworthy. It has demonstrated that its principles are negotiable when the politics are inconvenient. An institution whose principles are negotiable is not a cultural project; it’s just propaganda.

I want to go back to loving the songs. I want to go back to feeling something when the lights go down and 26 countries hold their breath together. And I really want to host my parties again. Hopefully, when the show finds its way back, so will I.

Until then, the world is witnessing a human catastrophe and looking away. When millions of people tune in on Saturday, Eurovision will just be the most visible manifestation of this.