Very few Americans know anything about the Eurovision Song Contest, though it’s a much bigger deal in Europe. Wikipedia explains it:
The Eurovision Song Contest (French: Concours Eurovision de la chanson), often known simply as Eurovision, is an international song competition organised annually by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) among its members since 1956. Each participating broadcaster submits an original song representing its country to be performed and broadcast live to all of them via the Eurovision and Euroradio networks, and then casts votes for the other countries’ songs to determine a winner.
. . . Traditionally held in the country that won the preceding year’s event, the contest provides an opportunity to promote the host country and city as a tourist destination. Thousands of spectators attend each year, along with journalists who cover all aspects of the contest, including rehearsals in venue, press conferences with the competing acts, in addition to other related events and performances in the host city. Alongside the generic Eurovision logo, a unique theme is typically developed for each event. The contest has aired in countries across all continents; it has been available online via the official Eurovision website since 2001. Eurovision ranks among the world’s most watched non-sporting events every year, with hundreds of millions of viewers globally. Performing at the contest has often provided artists with a local career boost and in some cases long-lasting international success. Several of the best-selling music artists in the world have competed in past editions, including ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias, Cliff Richard, and Olivia Newton-John; some of the world’s best-selling singles have received their first international performance on the Eurovision stage.
The rules are complicated, but individual viewers are able to vote alongside juries made up of ordinary music industry people from individual countries (see comment by Greg Mayer below for explanation of edit). This is all new to me, so pardon any errors, and by all means correct me.
There’s a political element to the competition, too. After October 7, 2023 and Israel’s response to Hamas, when European countries began turning against Israel, there were calls to exclude or boycott Israel, which weren’t successful. However, in 2024 the Swedish public demonstrated against Israel and its contestant, Eden Golan, singing the song “Hurricane“, written by Avi Ohayon, Keren Peles, and Stav Beger. I remember seeing large demonstrations against Golan at the venue and in her hotel, where she was ordered by her security team to stay inside. (The protestors include Greta Thunberg, sporting a kiffiyeh.) You can see pictures of the 2024 protestors, including the benight3ed Thunberg, at the Daily Mail site.)
Golan finished fifth in the final, but the imbalance between the public vote and the jury vote was striking: “Israel placed fifth in the final, scoring 375 points; 323 points from the public televoting and 52 points from the juries.” Out of 37 countries, Golan came first in the popular vote but 12th from the jury vote, giving her a final result of fifth place.
One might conclude from this imbalance that either Israel was stacking the popular vote (but that’s not possible because viewer-voters cannot vote for their own country), or the public was not as anti-Israel as was the jury. Remember, this is a song contest, and politics shouldn’t have much to do with it, though the results of public sentiment seem to show that jurists representing a country are less pro-Israel than the people themselves.
The year the results were similar: a big imbalance between the popular and jury vote. Israeli singer Yuval Raphael finished second in the overall results, winning the popular vote. The jury, however, put her in a grim 14th place, but together that allowed Raphael to finish second. It’s also amazing in light of her story:
Raphael was attending the Nova Sukkot Gathering music festival in Re’im on 7 October 2023, when Hamas militants attacked the festival. She hid inside a Death Shelter near kibbutz Be’eri with 50 other people, while sustaining shrapnel injuries from grenades thrown into the shelter. Raphael was one of 11 survivors, having hid under dead bodies for eight hours. In a speech before the United Nations Human Rights Council, she described what she witnessed during the attack.
She also suffered wounds from shrapnel.
Here she is telling her story about Nova in a 14-minute video. There are several recordings of the telephone conversation between Yuval and her father as she lay in the bunker, covered with dead bodies. It’s a very poignant account of a survivor—one who thought for sure she was going to die.
Yuval didn’t die; she remained motionless under the bodies, even as Hamas threw grenades into the shelter. Afterwards, as you see above, she started fighting back, and her testimony was one of the ways.
I suspect entering the Eurovision Song Contest was another. Here’s her performance of “New Day Will Rise” that won the public vote (the music video, incorporating themes from the Nova Festival attack) is here. Remember, this isn’t the world’s best music, but it’s still an immensely popular contest in Europe.
Just like last year, the European public revealed the quiet support & love they have for Israel. The elite media judges, unsurprisingly, gave Israel just 60 points, but the European people mostly love Israel but hate their own media elites, and so gave them the most—297!
🇪🇺❤️🇮🇱 pic.twitter.com/lFh8fuWoln
— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) May 17, 2025
Any “stacking” of Israeli voters cannot explain this disparity. Draw your own conclusion, but one thing is sure: Ruval Raphael was fighting back through music, and she has to feel good about the results.
h/t: Malgorzata
“Very few Americans know anything about the Eurovision Song Contest”
I know ABBA, and Waterloo, ca. 1974, and other random times I noticed it was on.
It says Eurovision dates to 1956.
Watched Yuval’s video: @8:42 — “Avi Sasi, he jumped on the first grenade…” deeply moving
I live in the UK, but haven’t personally watched Eurovision for more than 40 years. You’re right though, in saying that the public vote tends to reflect how popular a particular country is. Ukraine won in 2022. They were placed fourth by the jury but won the popular vote by a huge margin, which gave them the win overall. This of course reflected the wave of sympathy for the country in the wake of the Russian invasion.
It is significant that Israel has won the popular vote in each of the last two years. The Israeli entry topped the public vote in 13 countries, mainly but not exclusively those from western Europe.
The countries where the public televoting resulted in the maximum 12 points from each being awarded to Israel were:
At the start of the final, the Spanish national broadcaster RTVE (their equivalent of the BBC) displayed a notice in both Spanish and English reading, “When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and Justice for Palestine.” https://archive.is/okZxb
Israel won the public vote in Spain and RTVE has announced an investigation into the integrity of the televoting.
Edited to correct who called for the investigation into the Spanish public vote – it was the broadcaster RTVE, not the prime minister.
All this while Spain’s PM calls for Israel to be banned from Eurovision: https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/rjvavpdwlg.
To paraphrase Douglas Murray comments after the response by Young Israelis to Oct 7: These kids are amazing.
And to paraphrase our own D.A. (David Anderson): Onward Israeli heroes.
I’m in good quote company there, Jim, thanks. If ONLY I could write anything like Murray in my column!
🙂
D.A.
NYC
What did Albania do wrong? While Israel got 1st and 15th in the voters/judges Albania got 3rd and 16th – which is a pretty similar disparity. Other countries such as Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy are reasonably consistent across the two categories.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Actually, the juries are formed this way:
I misled Jerry on this point; I read another description of the juries which said they are demographically representative, and mistakenly took this to mean of the population at large, but as the fuller description above shows, they are music industry professionals. The juries do not vote together as a unit, but send in their individual ballots.
So the difference between the two sets of electors is general public (televoting) vs. music industry (juries). See here for more info: https://eurosong-contest.fandom.com/wiki/National_Jury
GCM
Politics aside, Eurovision has been boring trash ever since juries were brought back. When it was pure televoting, it was at least entertaining trash.
In short, disregard jury votes, only the public vote matters.
On a note more related to Yuval Raphael, the German progressive-left newspaper TAZ (Tageszeitung) published a commentary suggesting that Raphael’s appearance was a deliberate act of propaganda on the part of Israel’s government. A commentary on that commentary by the German Jüdische Allgemeine can be found here: https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/meinung/ohne-wissen-und-gewissen/
Until literal months ago, I used to be dismissive of the whole ‘The left controls the media narrative’ spiel on the right. Okay, I still am, since right wing media also exists, and while it has less publications, it has the bigger ones.
But things like these, so blatantly and egregiously at odds with the off-media mainstream, have certainly eroded my faith in left-of-centre media as a better source than the alternative.
I don’t remember it ever being just televoting. When I grew up there was o public element to the vote.
1998- 2009 had televoting with no jury involvement (some eastern european countries excepted).
A hearty f-u to the Spanish government and media. And while I’m at it, the same to the Irish government and media:
As an European, I couldn’t care less about Eurovision, but it is undoubtful that is a cultural phenomenon.
As a Spanish, I share the sentiment of some of the comments in this thread. I’m truly embarrassed about the public broadcasting stance. Yet, it baffles me that the popular vote massively supported Israel (in Spain and overall), precisely because, sadly, people across the political spectrum here have become profoundly anti-Israel (and in many cases directly antisemitic). I have yet to read a convincing explanation for this.
People in support for Israel can show their support by voting for, well, Israel. Since Palestine is not and can not be represented in Eurovision, the vote of the anti-Israel crowd is split between every other participating country. Perhaps next year, Greta Thunberg, Hasan Piker or some of the other Israel-haters with a massive platform will instruct their followers to vote for Spain as a token of solidarity with Palestine. Anyway, I would caution against reading too much into Israel winning the popular vote.
My guess is that most people in Euriope are, when reduced to the simple binary question, are pro-Israel and against Hamas. However, they don’t say so publicly because they fear getting cancelled or worse. The vote is anonymous. Note also that one person can vote up to 20 times (and more if they don’t notice that it’s the same person).
Jerry wrote:
“Very few Americans know anything about the Eurovision Song Contest”
This is probably true, but there was this decent movie staring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams (also with Pierce Brosnan, former James Bond):
I have seen it. It’s a good movie in my opinion. The average of the audience ratings at the website Rotten Tomatoes is 7.8/10 (10 being the best). The same metric for critics is 5.8.
Here’s the trailer:
Maybe the juries just didn’t like the song.
Yes, I suspect the juries were simply voting on the quality of the song, as they saw it. It’s hard to see why the juries would be any more (or less) anti-Israel than the general public.
The UK song was the opposite to Israel’s: The juries quite liked it, placing it 10th, but the public gave it null points, placing it last. The public voting tends to be culturally-based – people often vote for countries near them because that is the sort of music they listen to. And the UK has not been popular in Europe recently.
But it was certainly heartening to see the public support for Israel, in contrast to some of their governments.
Another example of how the masses feel differently to the elites. You’d never guess from the loud and violent protests in the UK and Canada that the majority of people are on the side of Israel. The stances of our politicians wouldn’t help you guess correctly either. It’s similar to the mismatch between the people and the “thought leaders” on trans matters. It’s hardly surprising that populism is coming back!
As for Eurovision Song Contest entries, my favourite winner was Sandie Shaw in 1967 with Puppet on a String.
I follow Eurovision pretty closely, and so I might have a bit of context here.
Ukraine won in 2022, partly through sympathy votes in the wake of Russia’s attack. They were unable to host and so hosting duties fell onto the UK.
Similarly, last year Israel won the popular vote, also through sympathy votes.
Because of the nature of Eurovision voting – you can vote for a country, but not against a country – sympathy votes have an outsize effect. That hurts the integrity of the contest, because it makes it harder for countries to compete merely on song quality. Even as a supporter of Israel, I would rather Israel win on song quality and performance alone, rather than narrative.
My suspicion is that this year, the jury tanked Israel because they knew it would be a disaster for the reputation of the contest if countries won predictably based on sympathy alone.