I mean, there’s obviously something going on. Public sentiment towards Ukraine is still strong and you still see yellow and blue flags flying but sympathy for Israel was never as strong and it’s since massively died off given how they’ve reacted. The vote is clearly not a reflection of genuine public opinion. But what’s going on, are certain people just voting loads of times?
Don’t vote “any other”, all of you commit to one before hand.
I’ll give you 3 answers, you pick your favourite:
- logical: Fans of Israel’s song/ supporters of their government only have 1 song to vote for, everyone else has 25 to choose between
- cynical: there are zionists all over the world, who may be a minority in a population overall, but they all come out of the woodwork and pull together at events like this
- conspiracy: Mosad, the Israeli spy branch of government, set up a bunch of burner phone numbers all over Europe and used those to farm votes for Israel, in order to push the narrative “look, the general public all over Europe support us” (75% of the Italian public vote that went to Israel in 2024 came from newly connected numbers)
You chose which you’d like to believe the most
Do you have a source for the 3rd point? I would like to read more about it.
I’ll see if I can find what I read last year, but may take some time
My limited understanding of Eurovision is that it has always been rigged.
It’s weird they’re in a European singing contest to begin with…
It’s not really “European” exactly; it’s a competition for member nations of the European Broadcast Union, and eligibility criteria for joining that is to be in the “European Broadcasting Area”; which, long story short, includes the whole Mediterranean area.
Ehh, the North African and Mediterranean Asian countries are all eligible to enter and just choose not to. It has nevsr been strictly European. There are much better reasons to not invite Israel
Didnt they leave to boycott something something?
I think Lebanon is the only one that has officially said they weren’t joining in because of Israel. They had an entry prepared for 2005 but the EBU wouldn’t agree to edit out Israel’s parts for Lebanese broadcast. It might still be part of the reasoning for the others, but it could just be a lack of interest too. I honestly don’t know. Morocco actually did compete in 1980 but did terribly and have not come back since. They are all still members of the EBU and therefore eligible to enter if they choose to
Israel supporters only have to vote for one country while the other votes are split between 25 others.
I think people who support Israel really really support Israel. UK in general has lost interest in Eurovision as everyone hates UK. So fewer voters with one agenda voted a lot vs a few pensioners splitting their vote between macciato and those handsome country men with guitars.
You can vote 20 times from any one phone number, and they don’t check if two numbers (or 200) are owned by the same person. And SIM cards aren’t that expensive. Goosing a Eurovision contestant’s vote would be relatively cheap and involve no breaking of any actual rules, let alone laws.
Maybe when the European Digital ID scheme comes in, they can use this to restrict votes per person, though this would still leave countries like the UK, Switzerland, Armenia/Georgia/Azerbaijan and Australia open to manipulation, unless they locked down their voting similarly. And you want something like Eurovision to be relatively frictionless, as it’s meant to be a party rather than a serious exercise in democratic governance.
- Ukraine’s song wasn’t particularly good this year*, which will have made it harder for people to support if they cared about the integrity of Eurovision as a song competition.
- Some people will just vote for whichever country most recently had a major tragedy and the initial attack on Ukraine was less recent than the initial attack on Israel. They won’t necessarily think about anything that’s happened other than that.
- The Israel’s contestant survived the October the 7th attack narrative has been pushed pretty hard, so that might have encouraged Israel supporters to watch Eurovision when they’d normally not have bothered. There wasn’t anything equivalent to draw in Ukraine supporters who don’t normally engage with Eurovision.
- People voting for a particular country are going to have a much easier time than people voting for songs they like - there’s only one Israel, but there are plenty of pop songs to split the pop fan vote.
- If you watch/listen to a vox pop on the news, there are an astounding number of people who believe either that Israel have only killed armed Hamas combatants, have done a minimal proportionate response solely to rescue hostages, or have the right to ethnically cleanse Palestine because they think Hamas attacked first with no provocation and don’t think ethnic cleansing is bad.
*the few times I’ve watched Eurovision, I’ve not agreed with the public or jury, so my definition of not particularly good might not be relevant.
the IHRA seemingly works really well.
