Looking beyond the madness
Hooked on Eurovision
Door Christien Boomsma
By Christien Boomsma
Christien Boomsma
Christien is sinds 2016 achtergrondcoördinator bij UKrant. Ze plant de achtergrondverhalen en begeleidt de auteurs. Bij haar eigen verhalen ligt de focus op wetenschap en academisch leven. Daarnaast schrijft ze veel over onderwerpen als sociale veiligheid en maakt ze graag persoonlijke interviews. In haar vrije tijd schrijft ze jeugdboeken en geeft schrijftrainingen.Sure, the Eurovision Song Contest is hysterical. It’s loud and musically not particularly innovative. Not to mention the endless bickering about who’s allowed to participate and all the complaining about favouritism.
‘But you know what? It’s also the only event that absolutely everyone has an opinion on, even more so than the European Football Championship. No matter your opinion, your country is being represented. So no matter where you are in Europe, you can always start a conversation about Eurovision.’
Social geographer Felix Pot is a fan. Every year, he, his partner, and friends try to get tickets to the show, using four or five laptops simultaneously. Not that it matters much. ‘We basically never stand a chance. Tickets go so fast.’ The only time he did manage to get tickets was two years ago when the contest was being held in Rotterdam, and that was because only Dutch people were allowed to come due to the pandemic.
He checks out all the song entries, and sometimes even the preliminaries in other countries. He stays up to date on candidates’ standing with bookmakers and is the first one to watch footage of the dress rehearsals. On the night of the contest itself, he’s glued to his television. People are allowed to make comments, but only before or after the performance. ‘But it’s okay to sing or dance along!’ he says, laughing.
Trends
Afterwards, it’s time to process the data. Pot collects everything he can get his hands on. Which country voted for which country? Who did the expert juries vote for? What about the public’s votes? Which song was the best when corrected for sympathy votes like the ones between the Netherlands and Belgium or Greece and Cyprus?
He uses the answers to come up with trends and insights. For instance, when corrected for sympathy votes, the British entry ‘Save all your kisses for me’ from 1976 was the most successful song in Eurovision history.
He also looked into the never-ending complaints about the dubious politics behind the contest. He concluded that ‘there are countries that band together to vote. Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia stand to gain the most from sympathy votes from the Balkan. Georgia and Armenia vote for each other and receive quite a few votes from the European diaspora. But even though these countries benefit from it the most, they’ve never won.’
As such, he’s not sure if favouritism is actually at work here. Rather, he puts the voting behaviour down to a shared musical culture. ‘Serbia and Croatia vote for each other, even though they have gone to war against each other’, he says. ‘In any case, favouritism never decides which song wins. You need all of Europe to do that. Like how everyone voted for Ukraine two years ago.’
In the future, he hopes to use his analyses in research on European unity. ‘But I’m not there yet.’ He chuckles. ‘I’m doing this research strictly on my own time.’
National identity
Nevertheless, the song contest has many links to his other great love: social geography. Eurovision may be apolitical in name, but it’s still a competition between countries. ‘It’s automatically political, because the countries will always try to outdo each other. That’s why they get a little hysterical sometimes.’
Some countries do this by marketing their own national identities. In 2010, Dutch singer Sieneke was accompanied by a barrel organ.
Some countries decide to have a little fun, such as Poland in 2014. Everyone loved the act, which involved buxom singers in dirndl dresses singing ‘My Słowianie – We Are Slavic’.
‘Everyone fell for it’, says Pot. ‘But it was a parody. They were pretty sick of the clichés about Polish women, the countryside, and big boobs, so they decided to show everyone how ridiculous it was. Except everyone took them seriously.’
At the same time, the contest mirrors European norms and values. Sometimes in earnest. Take Joost Klein’s entry for this year, for example, in which he sings about a world without borders.
That’s probably also why the song contest is so popular among the LGBTQI+ community, which has embraced the message of freedom and diversity.
Strategy
But countries also make strategic use of the festival, says Pot. Take, for instance, West Germany, which sent two entries to the very first edition of the song contest in 1956. One was by a Holocaust survivor, while the other one was by an American-style rock-and-roll artist. ‘For Germany, it was a way of showing that they were leaving their past behind.’
A more recent example is ‘Cleopatra’, submitted by Azerbaijan in 2020. ‘The song goes: “Cleopatra was a queen like me, gay, straight, or in between”. But in Azerbaijan, being gay or in between isn’t nearly as accepted. But it works for the Eurovision Song Contest.’
There’s something new each year, and that’s why Pot will always be fascinated by the contest. Nowhere else can you see how the public decides who’s truly part of Europe. Russia? Considering the speed with which the country was banned from participating, it’s not very popular. The official reason was the invasion of Ukraine. ‘But in reality it was because several other countries threatened to pull out if Russia was allowed to join.’
War had never before been given as a reason for excluding a country. The long-standing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia was never a problem. And despite protests from mainly Scandinavian countries, Israel is allowed to participate this year.
Politics
There’s also a ban on songs being too ‘political’. Belarus’s entry was barred in 2021. ‘According to the organisation, the song “I will teach you” clearly referred to the quelled protests after Lukashenko had been elected and so it was banned.’
But in 2016, Ukraine was allowed to participate with their song, ‘1944’ by Jamala, which was about the Russians driving out the Crimean Tatars in 1944, which was a clear reference to the Russian invasion of Crimea two years earlier. Russia tried to stop the entry, but the organisation said there were no political statements contained within the song.
Israel’s reference to the Hamas attacks in their song ‘October Rain’ was deemed too much. But after they changed it to ‘Hurricane’, it was allowed in. ‘Although the link to the previous song remains clear.’
Over the past few years, the public voters have increasingly stopped voting for Russia. Even the surrounding countries, which have similar cultures, no longer vote for it.
Withdrawn
Then again, others have deliberately turned away from their European ‘family’ by no longer participating in the contest. Russia did this, as did Belarus. But the fact that Turkey and Hungary withdrew from the competition is significant as well. ‘But sometimes it’s just about money’, says Pot. ‘It was the most important reason for Romania to quit.’
Pot remains endlessly fascinated. And so he’ll be glued to his television the whole week. ‘There are so many reasons to love Eurovision’, he says. ‘Maybe you enjoy the music; there are always some genuinely good songs. You can watch it to enjoy the spectacle of it all, or the technology that makes it all work. But you can also study the politics behind it.’
He argues that the Eurovision Song Contest is the only truly shared European cultural event. ‘It may look like a lot of hysterics on the surface, but it has so many layers!’