DEPOLITICISING EUROVISION IMPOSSIBLE, EXPERTS SAY

The Eurovision Song Contest is meant to be about celebrating music and cultural diversity, but politics inevitably seeps in, challenging the competition's long-standing claim to neutrality.

- NINA LARSON

Hopeful artists drawn from 37 countries will compete in this year's contest in the Swiss city of Basel starting next week, with the big finale on May 17.

Politics is officially barred from the event, but as with most years, organisers will have their hands full striving to keep tensions over culture wars and conflicts like Israel's war in Gaza from spilling into the glitzy festivities.

Experts agree that is a tall order.

"It's impossible to depoliticise the event," Dean Vuletic, a historian and the author of the book Postwar Europe And The Eurovision Song Contest, said.

"It is completely impossible," agreed Jess Carniel, an associate professor at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia.

"With everyone competing under their national flag... there is always an undercurrent of politics." From the inception of the contest nearly 70 years ago, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, has insisted on its non-political nature.

But politics have been omnipresent, from an Austrian protest over Spain's Franco dictatorship in 1969 to calls for European unity as the Soviet Union broke apart and Eastern European countries joined the contest in the early 1990s.