The Eurovision Song Contest is supposed to be about celebrating music and cultural variety, however politics inevitably seeps in, difficult the competitors’s long-standing declare to neutrality.
Hopeful artists drawn from 37 international locations will compete on this 12 months’s contest within the Swiss metropolis of Basel beginning subsequent week, with the large finale on May 17.
Politics is formally barred from the occasion, however as with most years, organisers can have their fingers full striving to maintain tensions over tradition wars and conflicts like Israel’s battle in Gaza from spilling into the glitzy festivities.
Experts agree that could be a tall order.
“It’s impossible to depoliticise the event,” Dean Vuletic, a historian and the writer of the e-book “Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest”, instructed AFP.
“It is completely impossible,” agreed Jess Carniel, an affiliate professor on the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. “With everyone competing under their national flag… there is always an undercurrent of politics.”
From the inception of the competition almost 70 years in the past, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, has insisted on its non-political nature.
But politics have been omnipresent, from an Austrian protest over Spain’s Franco dictatorship in 1969 to requires European unity because the Soviet Union broke aside and Eastern European international locations joined the competition within the early Nineties.
Before 1998 when Eurovision stopped requiring international locations to carry out of their nationwide language, some robust political sentiments expressed in songs garnered little consideration.
Greece submitted a music in 1976 slamming Turkey over its invasion of Cyprus, “but it was in Greek and there was not much attention”, Lisanne Wilken, an affiliate professor in European research at Denmark’s Aarhus University, instructed AFP.
Since then, elevated media consideration and the likelihood to place forth messages in English has meant that for “anyone who wants attention for a cause, Eurovision is a really good place to go”, she stated.
More latest expressions of political condemnation have actually not gone unnoticed.
Russia’s battle in Ukraine dominated the discourse across the occasions in 2022, when Ukraine gained the competition and Russia was barred, and once more in 2023.
And final 12 months, Israel’s battle in Gaza solid an extended shadow over the occasion, when 1000’s of demonstrators protested within the Swedish metropolis of Malmo in opposition to Israeli entrant Eden Golan participating.
Demonstrations are already deliberate in opposition to Israel’s participation this 12 months, with Yuval Raphael — who survived Hamas’s lethal assault inside Israel on October 7, 2023 that sparked the battle in Gaza — resulting from carry out her music “New Day Will Rise”.
Experts say they don’t anticipate protests on the identical degree as final 12 months.
One motive, Vuletic urged, was that “the campaign against Israel last year was not successful”.
“No country boycotted Eurovision because of Israel” and the nation garnered a excessive rating, he identified.
Experts additionally stated the EBU’s introduction of latest guidelines might have an effect.
The organisers have adopted a brand new flag coverage, barring contestants from displaying flags aside from that of the nation they signify, however loosening restrictions on the flags viewers members can show.
Eurovision defined that it aimed to “strike a balance to ensure that our audiences and artists can express their enthusiasm and identities, (while providing) more clarity for the delegations when it comes to official spaces”.
“I think the decision was mostly inspired by the references to Palestine last year,” Vuletic stated.
Wilken in the meantime warned that the brand new coverage might “backfire a little bit”, with the ban on contestants waving Pride flags, as an example, presumably learn as a part of “the war on woke”.
Carniel agreed, declaring that there had been “a bit of a backlash against so-called identity politics at the song contest, and criticism of the extent to which Eurovision has really leaned into queer fandom”.
By barring contestants from waving Pride flags or different symbols supporting LGBTQ rights, the organisers may “oddly be trying to bring more people in” by emphasising that the competition “is not an exclusively queer event”.
The United States will not be a part of the competition, however consultants stated President Donald Trump’s anti-diversity messaging might energise efforts by conservative forces in Europe desirous to rid Eurovision of its LGBTQ-friendly id.
At the identical time, the Trump administration’s assaults on European international locations might strengthen the competition’s give attention to forging a standard European id, Carniel urged.
“Given the current political climate,” she stated, “that idea of European unity against the outside is a strong thing.”
© 2025 AFP