<\/p>\n
The New York Times published two major investigative pieces on Monday examining Israel\u2019s involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest \u2013 one revealing a coordinated, multi-year government campaign to influence the popular vote, and a second breaking down the actual numbers behind it. Together, they make for uncomfortable reading for the EBU. We have put both reports together here.<\/p>\n
Eurovision director Martin Green\u2019s response, captured in a video circulating on social media, was brief: \u201cI don\u2019t really have much to say. I briefly read it \u2013 it\u2019s a rehash of what we\u2019ve been seeing the last few years. It seems to be a whole article about who did not win the Eurovision Song Contest. So, just because I enjoy saying this every time: J.J. won the Eurovision Song Contest last year, fairly and squarely. I don\u2019t really have much to say about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Campaign That Started Years Ago<\/p>\n
The Times investigation \u2013 based on previously undisclosed voting data, internal Eurovision documents, and interviews with more than 50 people \u2013 traces the Israeli government\u2019s Eurovision involvement back to at least 2018, when it spent over $100,000 on social media promotion for its entry. Israel won that year, and according to former Eurovision songwriter Doron Medalie, that victory convinced Israeli leaders the contest was worth investing in.<\/p>\n
Spending grew steadily. By the 2024 contest in Malm\u00f6, the Israeli government had poured more than $800,000 into Eurovision-related advertising, according to data from the Israeli Government Advertising Agency obtained by media watchdog The Seventh Eye. The bulk came from the foreign ministry, with a separate allocation from Prime Minister Netanyahu\u2019s \u201chasbara\u201d office \u2013 Israel\u2019s overseas propaganda unit \u2013 specifically for \u201cvote promotion.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the 2025 contest in Basel, the campaign expanded further. Finnish broadcaster Yle used Google\u2019s ad library to reveal that the Israeli government had purchased online ads in multiple languages urging European viewers to vote for contestant Yuval Raphael the maximum 20 times. Netanyahu himself posted the same call to action on Instagram. Pro-Israel groups across Europe echoed the message. Israel\u2019s deputy ambassador to Austria confirmed to the Times that he had personally contacted a diaspora group to mobilise support for Raphael.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s public broadcaster Kan said it had no prior knowledge of the government campaigns and believed the competition rules had not been violated. There is no evidence of bots or any covert technical manipulation \u2013 the campaign was entirely legal. But Martin Green himself acknowledged to the Times that it was \u201cexcessive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Numbers That Tell the Real Story<\/p>\n
The Times\u2019 second report puts hard figures to what had previously been suspicion. Using vote percentages obtained independently, and cross-referencing them with the total vote count published by Spanish broadcaster RTVE, the Times was able to calculate approximately how many votes each act received in Spain\u2019s popular vote at the 2025 Grand Final.<\/p>\n
Israel received 33.34% of the Spanish public vote \u2013 around 47,570 votes. Ukraine finished a distant second with roughly 9,620. Every other country trailed well behind.<\/p>\n
At first glance, that looks like a genuine landslide. But Eurovision allowed viewers to vote up to 20 times each. The Times calculates that just 2,379 people voting the maximum 20 times could have generated Israel\u2019s entire Spanish vote total. And to simply beat Ukraine into second place \u2013 which is all that was needed to claim the 12 points \u2013 only around 482 people voting 20 times would have been required.<\/p>\n
482 people. In a country of 47 million.<\/p>\n
Spain was not an isolated case. The investigation found that Israel won the popular vote in multiple countries where polls showed deep public opposition to Israeli government policies \u2013 a pattern that, the Times argues, is statistically very difficult to explain without some form of coordinated voting.<\/p>\n
How Eurovision Voting Works \u2013 and Why It Is Vulnerable<\/p>\n
For context: Eurovision results combine two separate scores. A jury of music industry professionals from each country ranks the acts and awards points from 12 down to 1. The public televote works on the same scale \u2013 whichever act gets the most votes in a country receives 12 points from that country\u2019s public, second place gets 10, and so on.<\/p>\n
Last year, Austria\u2019s JJ topped the jury vote with 258 points. Raphael received just 60 jury points. But her public vote total of 297 points pushed her to second place overall. JJ won the contest. Green points to the jury vote as a safeguard against public vote manipulation \u2013 but as the numbers show, the public vote still determines up to 12 points per country, and those points matter.<\/p>\n
The multi-vote system exists partly because Eurovision is a paid-vote contest \u2013 viewers pay per vote. Former voting monitor Stephan Teiwes told the Times the model persists because \u201cit\u2019s about money.\u201d Eurovision disputes that, saying it simply wants to give fans the chance to support more than one act.<\/p>\n
Conrad Myrland, director of pro-Israel group With Israel for Peace in Norway, told the Times he encouraged his 15,000 members to vote for Israel via social media, email and text \u2013 and noted that when they did, Eurovision\u2019s own automated system encouraged them to vote up to 20 times. \u201cSo the encouragement to vote several times for the same song came from Eurovision itself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The EBU\u2019s Response: Sidestepping at Every Turn<\/p>\n
What makes the Times investigation particularly pointed is not just the Israeli campaign \u2013 it is the picture it paints of an EBU that consistently avoided a transparent reckoning with the issue.<\/p>\n
Slovenia\u2019s broadcaster asked for full voting data after both Malm\u00f6 and Basel, and received no response. Spain called for a formal debate on Israel\u2019s participation and a review of the voting system. By September 2025, five broadcasters \u2013 Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia \u2013 were openly discussing a boycott.<\/p>\n
Rather than commission an independent investigation, the EBU hired Czech broadcasting veteran Petr Dvorak to interview members about their views on Israel\u2019s participation. Broadcasters later received only a summary of his findings, not the full report.<\/p>\n
In December, broadcasters gathered in Geneva expecting a direct vote on Israel\u2019s continued participation. Instead, the EBU put forward a vote on rule changes \u2013 reducing the viewer cap from 20 to 10, and adding language discouraging \u201cdisproportionate\u201d promotion campaigns. Approving those changes implicitly meant keeping Israel in the contest, without anyone having to vote on it directly. EBU president Delphine Ernotte Cunci acknowledged the arrangement \u201cmight appear to be rather bizarre\u201d but called it \u201cthe most democratic solution possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The five dissenters promptly announced their boycott. Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia will not compete in Vienna this week.<\/p>\n
What Has Changed for 2026 \u2013 and Is It Enough?<\/p>\n
The new 10-vote cap and the ban on \u201cdisproportionate\u201d third-party promotion campaigns are the EBU\u2019s direct response to last year\u2019s controversy. Under the new rules, the Times calculates that Israel would have needed around 963 voters in Spain to claim the popular vote win \u2013 still a remarkably low number.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s entry at this year\u2019s contest in Vienna, Noam Bettan, has already triggered a formal EBU warning after his team circulated posts urging voters to vote for him 10 times. Green confirmed the warning and asked that the posts be removed, stating that a direct call to vote the maximum for one artist is \u201cnot in line with our rules, nor the spirit of the competition.\u201d He again insisted such campaigns cannot affect results.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, other countries \u2013 having observed Israel\u2019s diaspora mobilisation strategy go largely unchallenged for years \u2013 are now running similar campaigns of their own ahead of this weekend\u2019s final.<\/p>\n
Green\u2019s dismissal of the Times investigation as a \u201crehash\u201d and a story about \u201cwho did not win\u201d sidesteps the central question both reports raise: not whether JJ\u2019s victory was legitimate, but whether Eurovision\u2019s voting system \u2013 combined with the EBU\u2019s unwillingness to release full data or commission an independent audit \u2013 makes it structurally impossible to know either way.<\/p>\n
That question will not go away on Saturday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Times published two major investigative pieces on Monday examining Israel\u2019s involvement in the Eurovision…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[38008,26026,38014,32990,37,38015,38016],"class_list":{"0":"post-110642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-ebu","9":"tag-eurovision","10":"tag-eurovision2026","11":"tag-hasbara","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-israeleurovision","14":"tag-newyorktimes"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116563130632995211","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}