Are you watching Eurovision this weekend? It used to be an innocent enough question. But it’s fast becoming a loaded one, as the silliest, frothiest, most joyfully kitsch event in music collides with a political crisis that it seems woefully ill-equipped to handle. Imagine a raucously drunken hen night, stumbling accidentally across a funeral procession.
This is far from the first time the annual song contest has taken place under the shadow of war. But it’s the first time I can remember Britain’s entrant bursting into tears in an interview, confessing to being “holed up in a hotel room trying not to have a breakdown” over the pressure for him to quit, or contestants becoming lightning rods for this degree of anger. Armed police now watch over the arena, while the Swedish host city of Malmö saw thousands joining street protests on Thursday night as tensions rose ahead of a threatened Israeli ground invasion of Rafah.
For this is, of course, about Gaza. Having lobbied unsuccessfully for Israel to be banned from Eurovision, as Russia was after invading Ukraine, pro-Palestinian campaigners have for weeks been urging viewers and participants to boycott the show instead. Well, fair enough: we all have our own private lines in the sand, and while refusing to watch TV seems unlikely to succeed if Joe Biden’s threat to halt some arms shipments fails to have an effect, cultural boycotts have long had a role in expressing the kind of helpless outrage many feel over Gaza.
Britain’s Eurovision hopeful Olly Alexander, who is gay, duly responded to the boycott call from the campaign group Queers for Palestine with a carefully worded statement endorsing an immediate ceasefire, the return of hostages and the right for both Palestinian and Israeli civilians to live in safety, but concluding that his dropping out “wouldn’t bring us any closer to our shared goals”. Yet what followed when he posted it publicly on Instagram was a torrent of online abuse, targeting a man who has been open about suffering in the past from bulimia and self-harming, and who was denounced only last year for signing a separate letter accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. There’s a crucial difference between advocating boycotts and hordes of trolls bullying individuals who don’t comply; a yawning chasm between pursuing peace, and threatening bewildered musicians.
Bambie Thug, the non-binary, self-proclaimed witch representing Ireland, has come under similar pressure, warning that artists are becoming “easy targets”. Meanwhile, at the centre of it all sits Israel’s 20-year-old Eden Golan, who finds herself representing a country simultaneously reeling from a horrific massacre and accused of perpetrating war crimes in response, and is surrounded by heavy security having reportedly received death threats.
Golan’s own life has been shaped by not one, but two conflicts: born in Israel to parents of Ukrainian and Latvian heritage, she grew up mostly in Russia, but the family returned to Israel after the invasion of Ukraine. She would be serving in the army now had her national service call-up not been delayed to let her compete in Malmö; yet she is arguably being held more publicly accountable for the conduct of this war as a singer than she would ever have been as a soldier.
Denounce it, and she would be accused at home of betraying the country that gave sanctuary to her parents. Fail to do so, as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000, and she risks becoming a pariah on stage. Although Palestinian flags are not allowed in the arena, and Bambie Thug has been asked to stop writing the medieval Irish word for “ceasefire” on their face in body paint, there was no stopping some spectators booing Golan at the semi-finals. We may be in for an uncomfortable Saturday night.
Although its critics accuse Eurovision of “pinkwashing”, or letting Israel launder its reputation via this riotously camp and feelgood contest, this year nobody seems likely to emerge squeaky clean. Much like Fifa during football’s battles over taking the knee, Eurovision claims to rise above politics – but in reality cannot escape it. Winning is never just about the song, with ancient grievances and alliances invariably influencing votes. But when Ukraine’s entry triumphed in the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion, there was something genuinely moving about the exuberant contest Liverpool subsequently hosted on its behalf, showing Europe united over something deeper than music. Although the nature of their own historically knotted conflict is different, you can see why Palestinians crave a similarly powerful statement that Gaza isn’t alone.
It’s ridiculous, of course, to expect the organisers of a cheesy song contest to resolve a tangle that has defeated presidents: wrong, too, to heap such heavy burdens on a bunch of pop stars never selected for their diplomatic skills. You might as well ask Love Islanders to fix the climate crisis.
Yet like all glorified popularity contests, Eurovision is a mirror in which countries can see themselves as others see them, and this year is no exception. The ordinary citizens’ sense of being powerless to help; the private qualms of leaders who supported Israel’s right to defend itself after the 7 October massacre, but feel compromised by its conduct in the resulting war; the unrivalled capacity of social media to kill the joy in everything while boiling every morally complex argument down to dumb vitriol – it’s all there reflected in the glitterball, twinkling grotesquely back at us. Are you watching Eurovision? Or is it, this year, watching us?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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