The Eurovision Song Contest 2026 opens today in Vienna in a climate that goes far beyond the usual televoting controversies. Casting a shadow over the edition is an investigation by New York Times built on internal EBU documents, voting data not publicly disclosed and more than fifty interviews. The picture that emerges is that of a multi-year government campaign led by Israel to transform the most popular music competition in the world into an instrument of public diplomacy and soft power.
According to the American newspaper, in fact, the Israeli institutional commitment around Eurovision dates back to at least 2018 – the year in which the country won the competition – but underwent a significant acceleration after the start of the conflict in Gaza, when pressure to exclude Israel from the competition multiplied in Europe. In that context, according to the investigation, the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu believed that a good result in the competition could demonstrate that the country retained sympathy among the European public, despite street protests, boycott campaigns and accusations of war crimes.
Documented spending exceeds $1 million on Eurovision-related marketing activities. For the 2024 edition in Malmö, Sweden alone, over 800,000 dollars would have been allocated specifically for “vote promotion”, with funds partly attributable to Netanyahu's hasbara office, the government structure that manages Israel's public communication abroad. The campaigns, always according to the New York Timesincluded multilingual advertisements coordinated between Israeli embassies and pro-Israel groups active in Europe, with explicit calls to repeatedly vote for the country's representatives. Netanyahu himself, in 2025, had published on his social media profiles an appeal to vote twenty times – the maximum allowed by the regulation at the time – for Yuval Raphael, running for Israel.
One of the most discussed data from the investigation concerns the structural vulnerability of the voting system. The New York Times calculated that, in Spain – where polls showed broad opposition to the Israeli military operation in Gaza – Raphael won the televoting with over 47 thousand preferences. According to the newspaper's analysis, fewer than 500 coordinated voters, each with a maximum of twenty votes available, would have been enough to secure first place in the country. The same dynamic could potentially have been replicated in other markets. That said, the New York Times specifies that there is no evidence of the use of bots or other illicit methods to manipulate the results.
The director of Eurovision, Martin Green, had previously recognized that the Israeli campaign in 2025 had been “excessive”, but had ruled out that it had affected the final outcome, both in the edition won by Switzerland in 2024 and in 2025, where Raphael had placed second. However, the New York Times claims that the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, provided participating broadcasters only with high-level aggregate data, without allowing for an in-depth analysis of voting flows.
According to the EBU, neither the fifth place achieved by Eden Golan in 2024 nor that achieved by Yuval Raphael in 2025 would have been affected by such campaigns.
However, the accumulated pressure has produced some changes. Five countries – Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia – have chosen not to participate in the 2026 edition of Vienna. In a secret ballot, the remaining broadcasters approved a regulatory change that reduces the maximum number of votes per viewer from twenty to ten. However, the change does not seem to have produced the desired effects: in recent hours, the EBU issued a formal warning to KAN, the Israeli broadcaster, after Noam Bettan's team – the Israeli representative for 2026 – had released videos in multiple languages inviting the public to vote ten times. The contents, the organization announced, violate the new rules and have been removed.
