Eurovision opens Tuesday at the Wiener Stadthalle. Vicky Leandros, who first sang "L'amour est bleu" for Luxembourg in 1967 in Vienna and finished fourth at age 15, will open the First Semi-Final by performing the song again in the city where the contest first took her in. [1] [2] The 70th-anniversary edition runs the First Semi May 12, the Second Semi May 14, and the Grand Final May 16. Leandros went on to win Eurovision in 1972 with "Apres Toi"; the opening pulls a piece of contest history back to the room that produced it.

The field is the smallest since 2003. Spain, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands and Slovenia withdrew over Israel's inclusion, leaving 35 broadcasters in the contest — the largest number of country boycotts in the contest's history since 1970, and a missing seat in the Big Five for the first time since Italy's 2011 expansion. [3] [4] Saturday's paper read the anniversary as public-broadcasting infrastructure; the boycott is the infrastructure stress test made visible.

The pressure is not only governmental. More than 1,000 artists — Kneecap, Massive Attack, Sigur Ros, Brian Eno, Hot Chip among them — signed an open letter calling for a boycott on the grounds that the contest is normalizing Israel's conduct in Gaza. [5] The EBU's December assembly bypassed a separate vote on Israel and adjusted the voting system instead. The 2026 edition is the first to run those rule changes live.

Leandros' opening is a piece of staging that pretends the contest is older than its present argument. It is. Eurovision will keep happening regardless of whose chairs are empty. What 70 years has not produced is a contest that decided politics belonged elsewhere. Tuesday's opening will be applauded; the count of who is missing will run the rest of the week.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles