The Eurovision Song Contest claims to be a non-political competition. – In vain, says Linda Eide. – The fact that it has always been politics is absolutely certain. The Eurovision Song Contest arose in the period after the Second World War with the aim of uniting countries through an irreverent song contest. – So the whole starting point for the Eurovision Song Contest is in a way political, believes Linda Eide. She is a journalist and presenter at news, but also has an above-average interest in Grand Prix history. Besides having walked a lot in red tracksuits, Vossingen has “done a bit of research” at the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). Eide has kept an extra close eye on the political scandals that have taken place in the non-political competition over the years. That is why she is not shocked to hear that it is Israel that is the preliminary favorite as of December 2023. – Have you noticed that Israel now tops the odds lists for next year’s ESC? – Now I have it. And it’s quite crazy since no one has heard the songs yet! Israel tops the odds There is still half a year until the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 kicks off in Malmö, but fans are already speculating about next year’s result. Through an odds list on a website linked to the song competition, the public can put money on who they think will win in Malmö. Many have reacted to the fact that Israel should be allowed to participate, and here in Norway alone several thousand have supported a petition demanding that Israel should not be allowed to participate in the competition. At the same time, it is Israel that tops the odds list. Most of the participating countries do like Norway and choose who will represent their nation in the spring. The odds list is therefore not based on the songs, but on sympathy and previous results according to the president of the Norwegian MGP club. Photo: Screenshot taken 21/12/2024 – Impossible to avoid politics in ESC Morten Thomassen is president of the Norwegian MGP club. He believes Israel tops the list now because many have sided with them in their ongoing warfare against the Palestinian people. – One can imagine that Israel can get sympathy from those who support them via Eurovision, says Thomassen. President of the Norwegian MGP club, Morten Thomassen, has also received the odds list, but says that it is not so important to interpret what appears in the odds lists quite yet. – It is a long time until Eurovision and most nations have not chosen their representatives yet Photo: Ksenia Novikova According to the European Broadcasting Union, EBU, one of the cornerstones of the Eurovision Song Contest is “its apolitical character”. It is also the EBU that decides who can and cannot participate. They decided that Russia could not participate last year, and they may or may not participate in 2024. But the EBU still emphasized to news earlier in December that the competition is a non-political cultural event. It was in connection with the question of whether Israel should be allowed to participate. – It is impossible to avoid politics in culture. You can see it everywhere, says Thomassen. Do you think the Eurovision Song Contest is political? Yes! Obviously. No, I think the competition manages to remain neutral. Show result Ukraine wins three months after the invasion Ukraine has done very well in the competition after Russia went to full-scale war against them in February 2022. Three months later they won the Eurovision Song Contest with a record number of points. – Then there was a good deal of sympathy that was out and about. Not many people would have thought that they had won in a normal year, says the president of the Norwegian MGP club about the victory. The Ukrainian group Kaluch Orchestra won the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. They were clear that a victory meant everything for the war-torn country. Photo: Heiko Junge / NTB It’s also not long since Ukraine, represented by the artist Jamala, won the competition with “1944”. Many thought the song was a jab at the Russian annexation of the Krym peninsula that took place two years earlier. Plenty of political scandals to choose from Linda Eide has gathered a lot of knowledge through her hobby-based Grand Prix research. The expertise is particularly good when it comes to political scandals and she cites an example from when her favorite song “La La La” with Massiel won for Spain in 1968: – It was a sensational victory that was considered dubious and a possible result of the dictator Franco’s sneaky tricks. Why did one country stop the TV broadcast in the middle and replace it with a pause image of a flower bed? And said that the winner was a completely different country than it actually was? But there are also examples of contributions that have had such an overt political message that the EBU has stopped them. In 2009, Georgia, which at the time had particularly bad relations with Russia, performed with the song “We Don’t Wanna Put In”. The final took place in Moscow, even though they did not finish because they refused to change the text. Read about several political markings in Eurovision history:
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War is popular again in non-political Eurovision – Israel tops the odds list – news Culture and entertainment
