EBU warns Israel’s KAN over promotion

Eurovision is supposed to be a song contest, but every year it also becomes a fight about the voting system. That is the real backdrop here. On Friday, May 9, the European Broadcasting Union formally warned Israel’s public broadcaster, KAN, after promotional videos urged people to use all 10 of their available votes for Israel’s entry, Noam Bettan’s “Michelle.” The videos were removed quickly, but the warning matters because the EBU spent the past year tightening the rules around exactly this kind of promotion. ### What did KAN actually do? The issue was not that KAN promoted its song. Every delegation does that. The problem was the wording. Videos tied to Israel’s campaign told viewers to “vote 10 times” for Israel in Semi-Final 1. Eurovision allows viewers to cast up to 10 votes, but telling people to spend all 10 on one act crosses the line the EBU now says broadcasters should not cross. (rte.ie) ### Why is “10 votes” the key detail? Because that is the maximum a viewer can cast. So this was not a generic “please support us” message. It was a direct instruction to concentrate every available vote on one entry. Martin Green, who runs the contest, said that kind of appeal is not in line with either the rules or the spirit of Eurovision, even if the overall vote is large enough that one ad campaign is unlikely to swing the whole result. (rte.ie) ### How fast did the EBU react? Pretty fast, at least by its own account. Green said organizers were alerted on Friday, May 8, and contacted the KAN delegation within 20 minutes to demand that distribution stop and the videos come down from every platform where they had been posted. He said KAN complied immediately. That quick takedown is probably why this stopped at a formal warning rather than something harsher. (rte.ie) ### Was this a paid manipulation campaign? The EBU’s answer seems to be no — or at least, not the kind it is most worried about. Green said the newer promotion rules were mainly designed to stop large-scale funded third-party campaigns. Organizers said they were satisfied these videos were not part of that sort of operation. So the breach here was narrower: the call to pile all 10 votes onto one song. (rte.ie) ### Why were the rules tightened in the first place? Because Eurovision spent much of 2025 dealing with arguments about televoting, promotion, and whether some campaigns were overpowering the contest itself. Green published an open letter in November 2025 laying out voting-framework changes for Vienna 2026, and coverage at the time tied those changes to broadcaster and fan concerns after the 2025 contest. This warning is basically the first visible test of whether the EBU will enforce those changes in real time. (rte.ie) ### Why does Israel make this more sensitive? Because Israel’s participation has already become one of Eurovision’s biggest pressure points. RTÉ says several broadcasters are not taking part in 2026 after the EBU confirmed Israel would remain in the contest, and disputes over voting around Israel’s entry were already part of last year’s fallout. So even a relatively small promo-rule breach lands in a much more combustible environment. (eurovision.com) ### Does this change the contest itself? Probably not in any direct scoring sense. The semi-finals are on May 12 and May 14, with the grand final on May 16 in Vienna, and Green explicitly said the scale of Eurovision voting means this incident alone would not alter the outcome. But it does put every broadcaster on notice that the EBU is watching campaign tactics much more closely this year. (rte.ie) ### So what is the real takeaway? The real story is not one set of deleted videos. It is that Eurovision’s organizer is trying to draw a firmer line between normal hype and vote-engineering — and KAN became the first broadcaster publicly warned for testing that line in 2026. (rte.ie)