The EU country refused to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 due to lack of funds: previously it was not allowed to participate due to debts

This May, the Swedish city of Malmö will host the 68th Eurovision Song Contest. While other countries are choosing their representatives and actively preparing for the show, Romania has refused to participate . This is due to a lack of funds to support the country's delegation at the contest.

The Romanian broadcaster Societatea Română de Televiziune reported that their budget does not have enough money to guarantee the country's participation in the international song contest in accordance with the high standards of Eurovision. In general, the history of Romania's participation in the contest is marred by similar cases when financial problems prevented musicians from performing on the international music scene. OBOZ.UA will tell you more about it.

Thus, in 2024, Romania, which has been a member of the European Union since 2007, will not go to the Eurovision Song Contest with the following reasoning: "The Board of Directors has approved SRTv's 2024 budget, which does not contain sufficient funds to guarantee Romania's participation in accordance with the increasingly high standards of the international competition. This year, in addition to the existing productions, TVR is allocating significant resources to other priority productions and projects. These include the broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Paris, the continuation of the re-engineering process - the automation of SRTv channels, investments in the news production system, further investments in TVR's new headquarters in Craiova and other long-awaited modernization projects."

Romania first participated in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994. However, the first such attempt took place a year earlier, in 1993. However, the country failed to qualify for the final. That year, the number of applicants for the contest increased dramatically. The organizers decided to introduce a pre-final qualifying round, and Romania failed to pass it.

In addition, Romania did not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest from 1995 to 1997, as well as in 1999-2001 due to poor performance in recent years.

But in 2016, the EU member state was unable to join the contest because of the Romanian broadcaster's debts to the European Broadcasting Union.

Romania has never won the competition, but in 2005 and 2010 it took third place. At that time, the country was represented by Luminita Anghel & Sistem with the track Let Me Try and Paula Seling & Ovi with the song Playing With Fire, respectively.

But Romania's worst result was last year, when the country finished with zero points in the semifinals.

As OBOZ.UA previously reported, the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 bookmakers' ranking has undergone significant changes for the first time in a long time. The outsider country Iceland, which previously balanced somewhere on the verge of the 20th place, has sharply risen up, overtaking Ukraine, which was at the top of the table.

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