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This weekend, the seventieth Eurovision Song Contest took place in Vienna. The winner is called Dana and comes from Bulgaria. The singing competition, once called the “Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson,” is today the largest music event in the world.
During the organization of the event, the Austrian security authorities were supported by the American FBI and the Israeli Mossad. Otherwise, the event would probably no longer have been able to take place. Many people in Austria still have the trauma of the three canceled Taylor Swift concerts in August 2024 in their bones. Without the intervention of the American services, dozens of fans would probably have lost their lives in the planned bomb attack. The (fortunately, in time arrested) perpetrators were radicalized young Muslims from Austria.
This year’s ESC also became a terror target because quite a few people believe that Israel should have been excluded from the singing competition because of its conduct of the war in Gaza. Five countries — Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland — are therefore boycotting the ESC 2026. Numerous protest rallies against Israel’s participation took place in Vienna.
No matter which side one stands on, the question remains: How is it possible that a song contest once founded to promote international understanding has now become the perfect terror target? Must we accept that international anti-terror teams have to be brought in so that artists from all parts of Europe can sing peacefully?
Fundamentally, the situation surrounding the ESC in Vienna reflects deep social fault lines and structural changes. Four central developments in society are becoming visible:
1. The normalization of the state of emergency
The fact that a European music festival can now only take place under airport-level security conditions, strict bag bans, the deployment of special police units and digital surveillance by international intelligence services shows a growing acceptance of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben described as a “permanent state of exception”. In concrete terms: We must painfully get used to a general loss of carefree ease. Large-scale events — especially music and cultural events — have lost their character as carefree places of refuge. Around the ESC, the militarization of security was striking: high-security zones, concrete barriers and a heavily armed police presence in public spaces are increasingly shifting from a temporary exception to a permanent necessity.
2. Extreme polarization and the failure of dialogue
The Eurovision Song Contest 2026 made one thing abundantly clear: culture is increasingly becoming a battlefield. Once founded as a peace-building project intended to connect peoples, the ESC is becoming a magnifying glass for geopolitical conflicts. Its opponents celebrate their uncompromising stance. Society is splitting into irreconcilable camps. The boycott by five participating countries and the simultaneous threat scenarios show that international cultural events can hardly still offer a neutral, unifying platform. Instead, they are becoming combat arenas for irreconcilable opponents. Artists are being forced to declare their allegiance. They are required to take radical positions on complex global conflicts. This harms art.
3. Digital radicalization in echo chambers
Cultural events are becoming occasions for threat situations. These are increasingly emerging through the rapid radicalization of individuals in isolated online channels. In short: online hate is beating culture. Society’s traditional mechanisms of control and integration — family, school, traditional media — can often no longer offset the influence of algorithmically driven propaganda in the digital sphere.
4. The tension between freedom and security
“Western” society must restrict its lifestyle and cultural life. The necessity of cancellations, such as the Taylor Swift concerts in 2024, or massive restrictions, as at the ESC 2026, calls into question the Western promise of a free, open society. We are facing a dilemma: How much personal freedom and privacy are we willing to sacrifice in order to achieve security? In the future, this decision will have to be laboriously fought over for every single cultural event.
At least one thing remains: the uncompromising staging of the event showed that modern democracies do not retreat defenselessly. When Vienna’s mayor Michael Ludwig was shouted down by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, he shouted back: “We will not allow ourselves to be terrorized away from here.” This sentence became the guiding motto. The ESC 2026 proved the resilience of democratic society, which defends its liberal way of life despite maximum threat and enormous costs.
