Netherlands Returns to Eurovision 2027, AVROTROS Refuses
Dutch broadcaster NPO takes over the country's entry for the 2027 Eurovision Song Contest in Burgas, while AVROTROS stands by its boycott over the war in Gaza.
Less than a month after announcing it was bowing out of the contest for good, Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS had to respond on Wednesday evening to a piece of news it hadn’t made itself: the Netherlands is coming back to the Eurovision Song Contest, just without AVROTROS. Parent broadcaster NPO has taken over responsibility for the Dutch entry in 2027, and AVROTROS made clear right away that it wants no part of it.
The boycott began in August, when AVROTROS argued that the contest could no longer be considered neutral while one of its participants remained tied up in a major military conflict. That participant is Israel, whose presence at Eurovision has triggered a string of withdrawals since last year. AVROTROS director Taco Zimmerman summed it up for Euronews by saying it is beyond dispute that international conflicts are increasingly affecting the contest, eroding its neutral character, and that the Eurovision Song Contest has as a result become a platform for division. The broadcaster announced at the time that it would sit out both 2026 and 2027, and on Wednesday it repeated that stance without softening it:
“Four weeks ago we said goodbye to the Eurovision Song Contest, and we made a careful, ethical decision about that based on our own standards and values. It is now up to the other public broadcasters to make their own decisions.”
The decision to return was made by NPO, which oversees public broadcasting in the Netherlands, and which justified the move as the country’s need, especially at this moment, to remain part of a unifying European event. NPO’s director of media, Jurre Bosman, framed it as a question of principle rather than practicality: it matters, he said, that as a public broadcaster we remain part of this unifying European event, especially now. The European Broadcasting Union welcomed the news without reservation. Eurovision director Martin Green said the EBU values the conversations held with NPO and looks forward to working together to strengthen the contest as an event that reflects the spirit of the “United by Music” motto, while the EBU itself said it was delighted to welcome the Netherlands back alongside NPO ahead of the upcoming event in Burgas.
The mechanics of the return, though, are as bureaucratic as they are symbolic. The EBU had set September 15 as the deadline for countries to confirm participation, and NPO pushed that deadline to the end of the month while it worked out internally who would handle the selection. Omroep MAX, BNNVARA and KRO NCRV had all previously turned down the job of choosing the performer, saying it didn’t fit their output, so the task fell to an independent team of music professionals working directly for NPO. Coverage and commentary from the venue will be handled by NOS. The contest takes place at Arena Burgas in Bulgaria, with semifinals on May 11 and 13 and the final on May 15, 2027.
What makes this reversal more interesting than a simple comeback story is that the reason for the boycott, as Dutch commentators themselves have pointed out, hasn’t actually gone away. The war in Gaza is ongoing, the EBU has not excluded Israel from the contest, and analysts have described NPO’s return as a legal workaround to the question of who funds and who leads the delegation, not as a resolved ethical dispute. AVROTROS’s arguments, as one commentary put it, have essentially dissolved on their own. That puts the Dutch return in sharp contrast with the rest of the group that sat out Vienna in 2026. Ireland has already confirmed it will not broadcast the contest in 2027 either, a second consecutive year, citing the continued loss of life in Gaza. Spain has not yet decided, but RTVE president Jose Pablo Lopez has said he will recommend keeping up the boycott, calling it painful that Israel’s public broadcaster remains eligible despite everything still happening in Gaza. Iceland also has not made a decision, while Slovenia, the fifth country from last year’s group, remains outside the scope of current reporting.
The ceasefire in Gaza has held since October 2025, though it has not fully stopped the attacks, and according to Palestinian authorities the death toll from the offensive that followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack has passed 73,000. Cultural policy rarely keeps pace with wartime reality, and it doesn’t here either: an institution that spoke the language of ethics a month ago is now speaking the language of procedure, and the gap between the two is left to whoever started the boycott in the first place.
