We’ve seen sore losers with this year’s Eurovision, and now there’s a sore winner.
It’s Austria’s JJ, who won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with the song, “Wasted Love,” but was upset that Israel took part and that Israel’s song, “New Day Will Rise,” sung by Yuval Raphael, came in first in the audience voting.
“I hope the competition next year will take place in Vienna—without Israel,” he said Wednesday in an interview with the Spanish news outlet, El Pais. “But the ball is in the European Broadcasting Union’s court. We artists can only raise our voices on the matter. It’s very disappointing that Israel is still taking part in the contest.”
He also zeroed in on the audience voting system as problematic. “There needs to be a change in the voting system. There should be more transparency in the televoting. This year everything was very strange on that front,” he said.
While JJ won overall, in the audience voting, he received 178 points while Raphael received 297. The winner is determined by a combination of the audience votes, plus the votes of national juries. The national juries awarded “Wasted Love” 258 points, while they gave “New Day Will Rise” only 60. This is similar to last year, when Eden Golan’s rendition of “Hurricane” was second in the audience voting but she only had enough jury votes to finish fifth overall.
While there was no outcry last year about voting methods when the Swedish Nemo’s “The Code” won and Croatia’s “Rim Tim Tagi Dim” by Baby Lasagna led in the popular vote, following Israel’s audience-vote triumph, there has been outrage in multiple countries.
The public broadcasters in Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, and Ireland have asked the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs the competition, to examine the results for voting fraud.
They were especially critical of the fact that audience members can vote up to 20 times. Now that the only Jewish state has won the popular vote, this method has become suspect, although televoting has been in use since the late 90s. Even Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish prime minister, weighed in to call for Israel to be banned.
Several European broadcasters and journalists have cited the fact that the Israeli government – and not KAN, the Israeli public broadcaster – sponsored ads on YouTube and other places urging the public to vote for Raphael.
Martin Green, the director of Eurovision, made a strongly worded statement early in the week defending the integrity of the voting system, which he called, “the most advanced in the world.”
Independent fact-checking network absolves Israel
Furthermore, Wiwibloggs, a website devoted to Eurovision news, reported that Spotlight, the EBU’s independent fact-checking network, found that there was nothing against Eurovision rules in the Israeli promotional campaign.
Wiwibloggs’ Jordi Pedra wrote, “Spotlight’s investigation notes that other countries also ran advertising campaigns, including Malta, Greece, Albania, Poland, Armenia and France.
Some of these were run by the artists themselves via their own social platforms, and some were promoted via the competing broadcaster in the territory — but with no link to their respective governments.” But there is apparently nothing in the contest rules against a government promoting its contestant.
While many may see Eurovision as a silly spectacle, it’s important to note that this coordinated questioning of the voting and promotional methods only when Israel wins a part of the competition hearkens back to the origins of modern antisemitism, as typified by the antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
JJ’s call for “transparency” in the voting, and Finland’s Erika Vikman’s statement, quoted by Wiwibloggs, that, “I read in Helsingin Sanomat today that Israel has been able to manipulate votes to a great extent. I feel that it is very unfair,” with their intimations of an Israeli conspiracy that “manipulates votes” echo the Protocols, which purport to be a secret Jewish plot for global domination.
The European contestants and broadcasters’ reasoning is simple: If Israel wins something, it’s suspect. In their minds, it is not possible that audiences around the world simply enjoyed “New Day Will Rise.” Their response is an unholy combination of bad sportsmanship and antisemitism, or antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism.
Raphael had no problem praising “Wasted Love,” however, saying in a press conference, “He has incredible vocals. He worked extremely hard, I’m very proud of him. He deserves it.”
But none of these European contestants questioning the results whom Raphael trounced with audiences could find it in their hearts to be similarly gracious.