Iceland’s public broadcaster RÚV will stay out of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2027 unless Israel is barred from competing. Six of the nine members of RÚV’s board backed that position at a meeting on Wednesday 30 September 2026, and asked the broadcaster’s Director General to notify the EBU accordingly. It is the fourth of the five broadcasters that boycotted the 2026 contest to settle its 2027 position, and the third to settle it as a no.
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Key takeaways
- Six of nine board members supported continuing the boycott at the 30 September meeting. The board asked the Director General to tell the EBU that RÚV will not take part in 2027 unless Israel is excluded.
- It is conditional, not absolute — but the condition is one the EBU has shown no sign of meeting. KAN sits in the confirmed 2027 field.
- Board chair Stefán Jón Hafstein said the EBU has not taken a substantive position on Israel’s participation, so the situation is unchanged from last year.
- The market repriced hard. Polymarket’s “Iceland to participate” contract went from 66% on 28 September to 10% on 1 October.
- Spain’s board finally has a date: RTVE’s directors meet in Santander in mid-October to vote on a second consecutive absence.
- A separate, non-political risk has appeared: Czech broadcaster ČT is reported to be cutting Eurovision as part of a 350 million koruna savings plan.
What’s on this page
What the RÚV board actually decided · Where the five 2026 boycotters now stand · Spain’s board vote has a date at last · Czechia: a different kind of risk · What the market did · The 2027 field as it stands · Sources
What the RÚV board actually decided
RÚV’s board met on 30 September 2026. Six of its nine members recorded support for continuing the boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, and the board asked the Director General to notify the European Broadcasting Union that the Icelandic National Broadcasting Corporation will not participate in 2027 unless Israel is barred from participating.
Board chair Stefán Jón Hafstein said RÚV’s position had not changed since last year, because the EBU has not taken a substantive position on Israel’s participation and the situation therefore remains unchanged.
Two things are worth being precise about, because they are the difference between a headline and a fact. First, this is a conditional non-participation, not a flat withdrawal: if the EBU were to exclude KAN, the condition falls away. Second, the decision is the board’s, expressed as an instruction to the Director General; what RÚV has formally sent the EBU, and when, has not been published at the time of writing.
In practice the condition is close to academic. KAN is in the EBU’s confirmed 2027 field, the EBU has rejected proposals to move Israel to Eurovision Asia, and the governance and neutrality changes it has made this year stopped short of an eligibility rule. Iceland was the last of the five to say anything at all, and it has now said the same thing it said in December 2025.
Where the five 2026 boycotters now stand
Five broadcasters stayed out of the 2026 contest in Vienna over Israel’s participation: RÚV, RTÉ, AVROTROS, RTVSLO and RTVE. Four of the five have now resolved 2027, and they have resolved it four different ways.
| Country | Broadcaster | 2027 position | Settled |
|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | NPO / NOS | In. NPO took the mandate on 23 September with NOS producing and broadcasting; AVROTROS, which boycotted, takes no part. The country returned without the boycotting broadcaster changing its mind. | 23 Sept |
| Ireland | RTÉ | Out. A flat withdrawal, and the only one that also withdraws the broadcast. RTÉ is Ireland’s sole EBU member, so there is no second broadcaster to hand the mandate to. | 17 Sept |
| Iceland | RÚV | Out, conditionally. Board decision of 30 September; the Director General is to notify the EBU unless Israel is barred. | 30 Sept |
| Spain | RTVE | Proposed out, not yet voted. President José Pablo López told the Senate on 22 September he will propose a second absence; the board votes in mid-October. | Pending |
| Slovenia | RTVSLO | Open. No intention to participate was ever lodged, and no extension was requested or granted. The decision is tied to the broadcaster’s 2027 Programming and Production Plan. | Pending |
The Dutch route is the one that matters structurally, and it is the one nobody priced. The Netherlands is back not because AVROTROS reconsidered but because the mandate moved to another member of the same public system. That option exists wherever a country has more than one EBU member broadcaster. It does not exist in Ireland, and nothing published suggests it exists in Iceland either.
Spain’s board vote has a date at last
When RTVE president José Pablo López told the Senate’s RTVE oversight commission on 22 September that he would propose keeping Spain out of Eurovision 2027, the obvious question was when the board would actually vote. There was no answer for over a week. There is now: the RTVE board meets in mid-October, in Santander.
The precedent is the 2026 vote, which carried by 10 in favour, 4 against and 1 abstention. That is a comfortable margin, and López’s stated reason — that RTVE’s central condition, KAN’s exclusion, has not been met — has not changed. The paper position still matters, though: a president’s recommendation is not a decision, and until the board meets, Spain is undecided rather than out. We covered the proposal and the Senate appearance on 22 September.
Czechia: a different kind of risk
Not every threat to the 2027 field is about Israel. On 30 September, Czech outlet Aktuálně reported that Česká televize is preparing savings of 350 million koruna, and that Eurovision participation is among the things set to go. The same plan reportedly cuts the crime programme Na stopě, children’s shows including Draci v hrnci and Šikulové, and overnight news output from Brno and Ostrava.
This is a press report of a plan that has not been finalised, and ČT has not published a withdrawal. Treat it as a risk rather than a decision. It is, however, a familiar one: Czechia sat out the contest from 2009 to 2015, citing cost among other reasons, and budget withdrawals have already taken Slovakia and Bosnia & Herzegovina out of 2027. Cost decisions and political ones get lumped together in boycott counts, which inflates the political number. They should be counted separately.
Moldova is a third category again: TVM has an EBU extension and, according to head of delegation Veronica Cojocaru, will decide within days, with the call resting on a chief executive appointed on 1 October. Moldova finished eighth in Vienna this year.
What the market did
Polymarket runs the only live market on 2027 participation: an event of fourteen country contracts with about $29.8K of lifetime volume. Read directly from the Gamma API on 1 October 2026, Iceland’s contract sits at 10.0%, bid 6¢ and ask 14¢, on roughly $612 of lifetime volume.
On 28 September the same contract was at 66.0%. That is a 56-point move, and unlike most of what this book has done it tracks a real event rather than noise. It is worth saying so, because this site has spent six weeks pointing out that the Iceland contract was untradeably thin and swinging between 30% and 73% on no news at all. When the news finally arrived, the contract moved to it and roughly doubled its lifetime volume doing so. A market being noisy in quiet weeks does not mean it is useless in loud ones.
The rest of the board on the same read, with 28 September in brackets: Canada 96.2% (96.3), Netherlands 95.9% (95.0), Germany 95.5% (95.5), Austria 95.2% (94.2), Israel 94.3% (90.5), Moldova 90.5% (90.5), Italy 81.5% (81.3), North Macedonia 78.6% (76.2), Belgium 62.0% (86.0), Slovenia 32.5% (52.0), Spain 11.9% (5.3), Kazakhstan 9.8% (12.2), Ireland 2.2% (2.6).
Three of those deserve a caveat rather than a narrative. Belgium’s 24-point fall comes with no new Belgian news we can find: VRT confirmed participation on 23 September and its unions filed strike notices for 11, 13 and 15 May 2027, both of which were known before the previous read. Slovenia’s fall is consistent with the Icelandic decision being read across to the one remaining undecided boycotter, which is a guess, not a report. And Spain more than doubling, in the week its board vote was scheduled to confirm an absence, is the one that makes least sense of all — on a contract with $3.7K of volume, which is not nothing. We are not going to invent a story for any of them.
Two methodological points this site has had to learn the hard way. Read bestBid and bestAsk next to the mid, because a quoted percentage above a contract’s own ask is not a real price. And read the API directly: numbers pulled through a caching reader have been wrong on this site before. Everything above was read live.
The 2027 field as it stands
Thirty-one broadcasters have confirmed for Burgas on 15 May 2027. Four have definitively ruled themselves out: Ireland (political), Slovakia and Bosnia & Herzegovina (cost) and Andorra (no reason given). Iceland is now effectively a fifth, on a condition that is unlikely to be met.
Still genuinely undecided: Spain (board vote mid-October), Slovenia (tied to its production plan), Moldova (days away), Czechia (budget), Hungary (negotiating a reduced fee and a 7 December deadline), Armenia (silent), Serbia (implicit only) and Kazakhstan (a debut bid resting on a full EBU membership application). Our Eurovision 2027 page carries the full confirmed, pending, ruled-out and boycott tables with sources and dates, and the winner market and bookmaker coverage sit alongside them.
The contest is in Burgas because Bulgaria’s Dara won in Vienna in May. Semi-finals are on 11 and 13 May 2027 and the final on 15 May — the three dates VRT’s unions have filed strike notices against.
Sources
- Eurovoix, 30 September 2026 (board vote, instruction to the Director General, Hafstein quote).
- ESCToday, 30 September 2026.
- ESCXTRA, 30 September 2026, reporting Aktuálně on the ČT savings plan.
Polymarket figures read from the Gamma API on 1 October 2026. Prices move; check before you act on anything here.