Intro Post

< 2025 Final | 2026 Semifinals | 2026 Final >

Gonna be honest, after this year’s Eurovision ended, my motivation to review it has been much lower than after last year’s contest. The Israel situation soured the entire show for me this year, far more than the past two years. But I’m pulling through and 11 days after the grand final ended, I finished going through the semis! 10 songs down, 25 to go.

Introduction

Hello again to my readers—hope you’ve all had a good Eurovision week! I certainly did, despite my heart pounding near the end of the results, but I’ll get to that later. In my time zone the show starts at 3 PM, so to watch it I had to take Tuesday and Thursday off work. I chose to take Friday off as well so that I’d have three days off in a row.

Last time Eurovision came to Austria was in 2015 right after Conchita Wurst’s victory, and it took place in the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna. The very same building was happily willing to host the contest in 2026, so it was pretty obvious we’d be back in Vienna, and indeed we were. It was the first Eurovision hosted in a country’s capital since Lisbon 2018.

The EBU made a big deal about this being the 70th Eurovision Song Contest, so it’s quite ironic that this is the contest with the fewest competing countries since semifinals were introduced in 2004. There were 36 countries competing in 2004; this year there were only 35. Moldova returned after skipping last year, Romania after skipping the past two years, and Bulgaria after skipping the past three, whereas five countries boycotted the contest because of the EBU’s asinine refusal to ban Israel from participating even though their presence is bringing the contest into serious disrepute.