RTVE will withdraw Spain from Eurovision and will not broadcast the competition if Israel participates

The Diplomat The RTVE Board of Directors, at the proposal of its president, José Pablo López, agreed this Tuesday that Spain will not participate in the next edition of the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna and that the network will not broadcast the competition if Israel continues to participate in the music festival, in response to the massacre in Gaza. Spain thus joins the position of Ireland, Slovenia, Iceland, and the Netherlands. According to RTVE's website, the agreement was approved by an absolute majority of the Corporation's governing body, which includes representatives of the country's main political parties, with ten votes in favor, four against (the board members on the proposal of the PP), and one abstention from the Junts board member. Thus, Spain is the first of the "Big Five" (also composed of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany) to make this decision. These countries are so named because they contribute the most to the Festival and are the five that always have a direct pass to the final. Furthermore, Spain was, until now, along with the United Kingdom and Sweden, one of the three countries that has never failed to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest. Following the news, the Eurovision Song Contest Reference Group, meeting in Dubrovnik, has taken note of the concerns expressed by several broadcasters. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) assembly will decide in early December whether to exclude Israel, as it did with Russia after the war in Ukraine. The director of Israeli public radio, Kan, Golan Yochpaz, has assured that his country will not withdraw from the contest: "There is no reason for Israel not to continue to be an important part of this cultural event, which cannot become political." In the last edition of Eurovision, held in May 2025, Israel was represented with the song "New Day Will Rise," written by Keren Peles and performed by Yuval Raphael, a survivor of Hamas terrorist attacks. The entry received the highest score from viewers, 297 points. A total of thirteen countries gave it twelve points, including Belgium and Spain. This, combined with the jury's vote of 60, gave it second place with 357 points. Around the same time, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez warned that, just as Russia cannot participate in Eurovision because of the invasion of Ukraine, Israel "should not do so either" because of the offensive in the Gaza Strip. The day after the contest, Israeli Minister of Diaspora and the Fight against Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, addressed the twelve points (the maximum possible score) awarded to the Israeli song in Spain through the popular televote. "It seems that the Spanish people have spoken, and we have heard the slap in the face here in Jerusalem," he wrote on the social network X.

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