Eurovision confirms 70th-anniversary icons
- Eurovision’s organizers confirmed a 70th-anniversary lineup for the May 16 Grand Final in Vienna, bringing back Ruslana, Verka Serduchka, Lordi, Alexander Rybak, and Kristian Kostov. - The official plan stretches across all three live shows, with Vicky Leandros opening Semi-Final 1 and Austria’s JJ returning in the Grand Final. - It matters because Vienna 2026 is leaning hard into Eurovision history for its 70th year, with 95,000 tickets already sold.
Eurovision is doing the obvious thing for its 70th birthday — and, honestly, the smart thing. The 2026 contest in Vienna is turning the live shows into a reunion special as much as a competition, with a stack of former stars now officially booked for the Grand Final on May 16. That matters because anniversary editions can feel like branding exercises if the nostalgia stays vague. This one looks more concrete. The names are real, the dates are set, and the host broadcaster ORF has laid out who appears when. ### Who’s actually coming back? The headline names for the Grand Final are Ruslana, Verka Serduchka, Lordi, Alexander Rybak, and Kristian Kostov. That is a pretty deliberate mix. You’ve got winners, cult favorites, and one of the contest’s strongest near-winners. Ruslana won for Ukraine in 2004. Lordi won for Finland in 2006. Rybak won for Norway in 2009. Kostov came second for Bulgaria in 2017 and still has a huge fan following. ### Is this just for the final? No — the anniversary programming runs across all three live shows on May 12, 14, and 16. The Grand Final gets the biggest nostalgia package, but the semi-finals are part of the same idea. Vicky Leandros is set to open the first semi-final, which is a neat bit of deep-history casting because she won Eurovision for Luxembourg back. ### Why these names? Because they cover different eras of what Eurovision became after the 2000s. Ruslana stands for the contest’s post-Soviet expansion and one of Ukraine’s biggest wins. Verka is the chaos-and-camp side of Eurovision in one human package. Lordi represents the moment Eurovision proved a hard-rock monster act could actually win. Rybak is the poster-child more like serious pop competition. Put together, the lineup is less random than it looks. It is a compressed history lesson. ### Why is Vienna leaning so hard on the archive? Because the 70th edition is a rare chance to make the contest feel bigger than one season’s field of songs. Vienna was confirmed as host city back in August 2025, and the whole setup has been framed as a landmark edition from the start. The venue is the Wiener Stadthalle, and the live shows are locked for May — that expectation is not a burden — it
