Eurovision 2026: Seventy Years of Repressed Geopolitics

Major international media events are as much about what they hide, conceal, and neglect as they are about what they show, exalt, and stage. This applies to major diplomatic summits (G7, G20, BRICS, SCO), military parades (Bastille Day in France, May 9th in Russia, September 3rd in China), major sports competitions (Olympics, FIFA World Cup, UEFA Euro) but also to the audiovisual “masses” inherited from the post-war era like royal weddings, state funerals, and Eurovision.

These mythologies inherited from the Glorious Thirty, where the obvious serves as much for analysis as oblivion. For its 70th edition in Vienna, the Eurovision Song Contest once again found itself caught in its customary paradox between proclaimed apoliticism and the inevitable politicization of candidates, songs, locations, participations, and absences. Thus, this jubilee edition was marked by the boycott of five major European audiovisual groups due to the participation of the Israeli audiovisual group KAN, with Franco-Israeli Noam Bettam. The political aporia is obvious: can Russia be excluded but Israel remain in the contest?

Totems and Taboos

Several major political causes have asserted themselves through Eurovision. They represent as many totems that the institution salutes, edition after edition, despite the apoliticism of the candidates claimed by the contest’s regulations. But others have been silenced, like so many taboos.

Since at least Conchita Wurst’s victory in 2014, Eurovision has become a “safe place” or a venue for LGBTQI+ community expression. Eurovision has become a totem of Europeans’ attachment to protecting sexual, gender, linguistic, cultural, social minorities, etc. In this vein, it has been extensively criticized by illiberal or authoritarian European leaders (Viktor Orban, the Kaczynski brothers, Robert Fico), and non-European representatives presenting candidates at Eurovision (Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan).

The paradox is that Eurovision’s vocation is relatively recent and has not prevented the contest from neglecting women’s liberation, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender equality through disdain or neglect. While there are female interpreters, staged for their bodies and voices, there are very few female authors.

The Return of the Repressed

According to Freud (“Die Verdrängung,” 1915), repression is not forgetting, it is truly an active process: something is pushed out of conscious awareness because it is threatening, but this energy does not disappear. It returns, distorted, symptomatic, often at the most inopportune moment. In Eurovision’s case, what it represses, whether dictatorship, male dominance, or colonialism, does not disappear: it returns in forms that the contest can no longer control.

Therefore, Barthesian myth is a mechanism of repression: it represses history under nature, the contingent under the evident. That is why every geopolitical scandal around the contest is a return of the political repression that the festive format can no longer contain.

These multiple contrasts between political obviousness and repressions pose a daunting question to the contest: does it have a political future? As Europeans divide over the Israeli-Palestinian question, the Eurovision Asia event in the autumn seems to offer a new perspective.

The Future of Euro-Illusion

These contrasts and political repressions pose a challenging question to Eurovision: does it have a political future? As Europeans divide over the Israeli-Palestinian question, the Eurovision Asia event in the autumn seems to offer a new perspective. It aims to project a European model of kitschy and inclusive soft power on a global scale, risking confrontation with new cultural authoritarianisms.