Tthe European Broadcasting Union, which organizes Eurovision, is like the European Central Bank: whenever it is called upon to make an important decision, it can always be relied on to make the wrong one, and it depends entirely on a mixture of goodwill and inertia which leads the international community not to talk about it. His bet is a pervasive sense of “Oh well, he made the wrong call again. Never mind. Better luck next year/the next global financial crisis”, and it’s one that mostly pays off. This time tomorrow we’ll have forgotten that he wouldn’t allow Volodymyr Zelenskiy to address the contest, instead of Ukraine, because he didn’t want to politicize the event.So I just want to pause for a second to comment on how silly that was.
Inevitably, Ukraine was the only thing talking – it was subtext and subtext, from the opening song, Stefania by last year’s Ukraine winners Kalush Orchestra, to the rousing centerpiece, a rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone sung by Duncan Laurence from the Netherlands and everyone else too. The war was criticized from all angles, while Putin responded to his pariah status bomb the hometown of the participants from Ukraine, Tvorchi, with the fabulous claim of an uninvited fairy godmother. To think that keeping a lid on the president of Ukraine at night could somehow float above world events was laughable: it was a four-hour anti-war protest, with extra neon.
The goal of maintaining neutrality does not understand either politics or Eurovision, or probably both. Eurovision has been political since its inception, with voting preferences between countries following political allegiances closely enough for this to have its own field of academic study analyze which countries are in which clusters and how this has changed over time. I’m sure there is something that is self-fulfilling. The Nordic bloc has appeared thick as thieves since serious statistical analysis began (late 1990s). This built its status as a geopolitical entity, which in turn generated a stronger cultural identity. How can you depoliticize it?
The night itself has always served a specific political function, something akin to a family Christmas, where warring parties take their dispute to group arbitration: Turkey vs. Greece, Armenia vs. Azerbaijan, Georgia vs. Russia. In fact, it’s a lot like a family Christmas, as the group never quite knows how to play their judicial role and tends to pick sides at random, depending on how drunk they are. Nobody said that Eurovision was effective in politics; it is anything but apolitical.
What it does best, politically, is a sign of disapproval, nations uniting to punish or expel wrongdoers; it is much more subtle than a mob. There are degrees of disapproval, from expulsion (Russia in 2022), to recoverable but painful zero points (UK in 2003, which was absolutely understood as a response to the invasion of Iraq, despite the quality from Gemini’s song).
I’ll tell you how lucky it was: that the night fell a week after the coronation, not before. If we’d been looking at Penny Mordaunt’s teal battle dress after Netta’s insect warrior shell, or King Charles’ 40-foot red velvet train after Croatia’s spectacular floral military garb, we’d have thought: this is all very camp, very melodramatic, just like Eurovision, only not as good – wow, he didn’t even take his pants off. All rituals are equal, but not all are born equal: they exist to bring us together around a principle. The Eurovision principle – that there is more that unites us than divides us, or in Liverpool’s words, “united we are” – may be schmaltzy, but at least (as opposed to, say, “fealty” ) means something.
