The Netherlands is out of Eurovision again. On Monday 24 August 2026, AVROTROS confirmed it will not compete at Eurovision 2027 in Burgas, making the Dutch broadcaster the first of the five 2026 boycotters to formally rule out a return. The reason is the one it gave last year: Israel is still in the contest.
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The decision reverses what Dutch television was reporting three days earlier, and it arrived hours after we published a piece arguing the market had the Netherlands priced too cheaply. More on that below, because being wrong in public is worth writing down.
What AVROTROS actually said
The broadcaster's position is narrower than a blanket boycott, and the wording matters. AVROTROS says the contest can no longer be considered neutral while a participating country is “still involved in a large-scale military conflict”.
Over the past year it had asked the EBU for one specific thing: transparent rules governing the participation of countries involved in military conflicts. The EBU has since announced a package of changes — including a host-security ineligibility clause, codified promotion limits and a proposed voting overhaul. AVROTROS's judgement is that those changes “do not provide sufficient confidence that the independent and neutral character of the Eurovision Song Contest has been restored”.
Read that as a verdict on the reform package, not just on Israel. The EBU moved; AVROTROS decided it did not move on the thing that mattered to it. There was no member vote on Israel's participation, and the contest director has said there will not be one.
The detail everyone will miss: the mandate went back to NPO
This is the part that stops “the Netherlands is out” from being the whole story.
AVROTROS has handed responsibility for Dutch participation back to NPO, the Dutch public broadcasting umbrella, which will now decide how to proceed for 2027. AVROTROS is not the Netherlands; it is the member organisation that has held the Eurovision brief. Nothing in EBU rules requires that brief to stay with it.
So there are two live questions, not one:
Will AVROTROS compete? Answered. No.
Will the Netherlands compete? Not answered. NPO now owns that decision, and Omroep MAX has been the name repeatedly floated as a willing successor — senior figures there called the 2026 withdrawal a mistake. A different Dutch broadcaster stepping in is a real path, not a fan theory.
Anyone reading a Dutch participation market should be pricing the second question. Wikipedia and much of the fan press will list the Netherlands as withdrawn from today; that is correct about AVROTROS and premature about the country.
Where this leaves the other four
Five broadcasters left over Israel in 2026 — the largest coordinated withdrawal since 1970. One has now made its 2027 call. The other four have not.
Ireland (RTÉ) is the closest to following. Director general Kevin Bakhurst has said there is no reason at the moment to change the position, citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza. We have written up the full Irish case, with a call attached — we make it about 85% that Ireland stays out.
Spain (RTVE) is examining whether “the conditions are right”, and has kept Benidorm Fest preparations running — which is what a broadcaster does when it wants to keep the option open rather than close it.
Slovenia (RTVSLO) has moved the other way. A return is under consideration, tied to its 2027 programme and production plan and the EBU's application deadline. Of the four, this is the one showing the most movement toward coming back.
Iceland (RÚV) will decide after evaluating the 2026 contest, and has said little since.
And then there is Belgium, which did compete in 2026 and is now the candidate to make it six. We cover that separately in the full participation board.
We got this wrong this morning
Earlier on 24 August we published a piece built on the 21 August Dutch television report that AVROTROS had already decided to return. We argued the Polymarket price of 35.5% looked too low and that the market had not caught up with the news.
The market was closer to right than the scoop was. A thinly-traded contract sitting at roughly one-in-three was a better description of reality than a broadcast report claiming the decision was made and about to be announced.
Two things are worth extracting from that.
A single-sourced media report is not a resolved fact. We described the gap between the report and the price as one that “cannot both be a fair description of the world”. That framing was wrong. A report of a decision and a market price on the decision can absolutely coexist, because reports of unannounced decisions are frequently premature or simply incorrect.
Low liquidity does not mean low information. Our argument leaned on volume being tiny, and treated that as evidence the price was stale. Thin markets are hard to trade and quick to go stale, but neither is the same as being wrong. We used a real weakness of the market as a reason to dismiss its conclusion.
The section of that piece that did hold up is the one headed “Why we are not calling this free money.” The conclusion — a watch, not a trade — was right even though the reasoning behind it pointed the other way. That article stays up with a correction on it, because deleting it would be the wrong lesson.
Quick answers
Is the Netherlands in Eurovision 2027? AVROTROS is not. Whether the Netherlands competes under a different broadcaster is now NPO's decision and remains open.
Why did AVROTROS withdraw? It says the contest cannot be considered neutral while a participating country is involved in a large-scale military conflict, and that the EBU's announced changes do not restore the contest's independence.
Which broadcaster could replace it? NPO decides. Omroep MAX has been the most-discussed candidate, having criticised the 2026 withdrawal.
How many countries have now withdrawn from 2027? Three are listed out — the Netherlands, Andorra and Bosnia and Herzegovina — with Slovakia separately confirming it will not return. Twenty-one are confirmed in and ten are undecided.
When is the deadline? Broadcasters must apply to the EBU by mid-October 2026. The confirmed list is expected by late 2026, ahead of the contest in Burgas on 11, 13 and 15 May 2027.