The second semi-final of the 70th Eurovision Song Contest goes live tonight from the Wiener Stadthalle at 21:00 CEST, with fifteen acts competing for ten places in Saturday's grand final and three pre-qualified Big Four members — France, Austria and the United Kingdom — performing non-competitively in the breaks. [1] Australia's Delta Goodrem sings Eclipse in slot eleven. Bulgaria opens; Norway closes. The field is the smallest at any Eurovision since 2003, after five public broadcasters — Spain's RTVE, Ireland's RTÉ, Slovenia's RTV, Iceland's RÚV and the Netherlands' AVROTROS — walked out over Israel's continued participation. [2]

The paper's Tuesday account recorded the withdrawals as institutional. Tonight records what the boycotters built instead. Ireland's RTÉ is running The End of the World with Beanz, with 1993 Eurovision winner Niamh Kavanagh cast as a reindeer herder, and will broadcast a Father Ted episode instead of Saturday's final. [3] Spain's RTVE has commissioned a five-night musical anthology called La casa de la música — The House of Music. Slovenia's RTV is running Voices of Palestine, an explicitly framed counter-program. The boycott is no longer an absence on the broadcast. It is a parallel broadcast.

The same week the EBU issued KAN, Israel's public broadcaster, a formal warning over a promotional video that urged viewers to "vote 10 times for Israel" — a phrase that mapped one-for-one onto the new per-fan vote cap the EBU itself had introduced this season. [4] KAN removed the video. Eurovision director Martin Green said the call to "vote 10 times for one artist or song is also not in line with our rules nor the spirit of the competition." That is unusually direct language for the EBU, which has spent two years preferring not to comment.

Underneath the warning sits a New York Times investigation, published Monday, alleging that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hasbara office spent more than $1 million on Eurovision-related advertising across recent contests, including direct calls to vote for Yuval Raphael — the singer who placed second in 2025 on a fifteenth-place jury rank — at the maximum of twenty votes per viewer. [5] That number, twenty, is exactly the figure the EBU halved this year. The contest's vote architecture has been modified specifically to absorb one country's documented strategy. That is a governance artifact, not a controversy.

The voting cap is one of three concurrent rule changes. Online votes now require credit-card verification to confirm geographic origin, and jury voting has returned to the semi-finals for the first time since 2022. [6] None of these changes resolves the underlying argument. They redirect it. The five boycotting broadcasters argue that the contest cannot quarantine politics with bookkeeping while a war continues. The EBU argues that procedural fairness is the only intervention available to a federation of public broadcasters that cannot agree on who should be in the room.

Vienna police have called this one of the largest security operations they have ever run for a single event, with airport-style screening at venues, drone bans within 1.5 kilometres of contest sites, and an FBI cyber liaison desk activated in New York from this week. [7] Tomorrow is Nakba Day — May 15 — when Palestinians commemorate the displacement of 1948. Protest movements have already announced they will mark it inside Vienna. Demi Moore, in a different room at a different festival, said this week that "if we start censoring ourselves then we shut down the core of our creativity." [8] Eurovision is the case where the federation tried to censor neither itself nor anyone else, and the audience split anyway.

Inside the arena tonight, the favourites in the bookmaker market are Denmark and Norway, with Australia's Goodrem rated a strong outside qualifier. The pre-qualified UK entry, Look Mum No Computer's Eins, Zwei, Drei, performs out of competition. The result will be announced live; the full jury-and-televote breakdown, as always, will not be made public until after Saturday's final. RTÉ noted this week that it has still not received the full per-country televote breakdown from 2025 — a complaint that was answered tonight only by the fact that the breakdown is being held back by another twenty-four hours.

What the second semi-final tests is not whether Israel's Noam Bettan can advance from Tuesday's first semi-final — he already did, with audible "stop the genocide" chants on the live broadcast feed and three audience members removed by security — but whether the European public broadcasting union's voting infrastructure now holds. [2] If it does, the EBU has demonstrated that you can modify a competition's voting cap mid-cycle to dampen a single country's documented strategy and survive the modification. If it does not, the boycotters' counter-programming becomes the more honest answer. Either way, two song contests are airing tonight on the same continent. Only one of them is being scored.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles