Much like the controversy in the US over the popular vote versus the Electoral College, Israel tends to garner big numbers in Eurovision audience voting and far fewer votes from the national juries.
This was especially true Saturday night, as Yuval Raphael, Israel’s contestant, led the audience voting at the 69th Eurovision Song Contest with her song “New Day Will Rise.”
She ended up with 297 votes from the millions watching around the world, the highest audience score of the night. When added to her 60 votes from the international juries, the audience votes gave her a final total of 357, which put her in second place overall.
The winner of the contest, Austria’s JJ for the song “Wasted Love,” by contrast, won 258 points from the juries but only 178 from audience televoters.
This is the third year in a row that popular votes for Israel vastly outstripped the number of votes it received from the national juries.
The disparity is not at all surprising when you look at the context. In commentary during the Eurovision final, public broadcasters in Europe criticized Israel because of the war it is fighting against Hamas in Gaza. Spain even broadcast a title card saying, in Spanish and in English, “When human rights are at stake, silence is not an option. Peace and Justice for Palestine.”
Ireland and Spain’s public broadcasters called for discussion about whether to allow Israel to take part at all prior to the competition, or in other words, wanted to discuss barring Israel. Seventy former Eurovision participants called for Yuval Raphael to be banned from competing as the competition kicked off last week.
But music lovers around the world felt very differently, as was apparent from their votes for Israel. The story was similar last year, when Eden Golan’s “Hurricane” came in second in the audience voting but only placed fifth overall due to low votes from the national juries.
The international audience shows support for Israel
Audiences in Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Portugal, and the United Kingdom all gave Israel “douze points,” or their highest score. Israel also got 12 points from the “Rest of the World” voters.
The message is crystal clear: While the elite staff of the public broadcasters may despise Israel, audiences around the world either enjoyed the song, were touched by Raphael’s story of survival, or both.
As author and commentator Hen Mazzig put it on X/Twitter: “#Eurovision public vote is saying: social media is not real life.”
This is an important fact to keep in mind. While certain sectors of the population of European countries may despise Israel, hundreds of millions of voters put their money where their votes were – and chose Israel.