AVROTROS, the Dutch public broadcaster, will not take part in next year's Eurovision Song Contest, Al Jazeera reports. Its director-general, Taco Zimmerman, said: "International conflicts are increasingly affecting the Contest, undermining its neutral character."

The broadcaster's position is that the war in Gaza and the divisions around it have made Eurovision a platform for division rather than a neutral event.

The claim being made, and its difficulty

Eurovision's founding proposition is that it is a music competition and not a political one. The Dutch argument is not that it should become political; it is that it already has, and that the organizers have not managed it.

The counter-argument is worth stating too. A contest that excludes a participating broadcaster because of its government's conduct has also made a political decision, just a different one. There is no available position that is not a choice, which is the difficulty the European Broadcasting Union has been in for some time.

Israel finished second in both 2025 and 2026, which kept the question at the front of each contest rather than at its margins.

The rule change that did not settle it

Earlier this month the organizers announced changes, including excluding countries at war from hosting. AVROTROS found them insufficient to restore confidence in the contest's independence.

That is a narrow fix to a broad complaint. A hosting rule addresses where the show is staged, not who competes in it, and the objection raised by the withdrawing broadcasters is about participation.

The scale of the walkout

Five countries stayed away from this year's contest over Israel's participation: the Netherlands, Iceland, Spain, Ireland and Slovenia. The last three declined to broadcast it at all.

This year's contest drew 131 million viewers, 35 million fewer than the year before. Attributing that fall to the boycotts alone would be a guess, since audiences for large television events have been declining for other reasons as well, and the source does not break the number down.

Next year

The 2027 contest is scheduled for May 15 in Burgas, Bulgaria, after the Bulgarian singer Dara won this year's edition in Vienna.

What we could not establish

We could not establish whether the EBU has responded to the Dutch decision, whether the other four broadcasters will return, what the full set of August rule changes contained, or whether Israel is expected to compete in 2027. We verified this account from a single publication.