Television personalities Graham Norton and Hannah Waddingham stand behind a desk on a stage in their glittery outfits. They are listening to the representative from the Lithuanian broadcasting jury who announces via satellite that they are giving twelve points to Sweden. A chant starts up from the crowd, “cha cha cha! cha cha cha! CHA CHA CHA!” growing louder and louder, almost menacingly until Hannah and Graham are forced to uncomfortably raise their hands and urge the crowd to calm themselves.
Yes I’m talking about the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual televised event where countries send their “best” and campiest singers to square off against one another to determine who will win a fairly meaningless trophy and be forced to host the incredibly expensive event the following year.
The politics of this supposedly apolitical event are always interesting Since Brexit, the UK comes pretty consistently at the bottom of the ranks; when Israel hosted (Israel and Australia are both involved, more on this later), the Icelandic entry was chastised for holding up Palestinian flags. And of course there’s the Nordic voting block, the former Yugoslavian voting bloc, the mini voting bloc Greece and Cyprus have with each other, and the fact that Black performers are generally treated poorly. But for this column I want to take a second look at the way politics play out in Eurovision’s structure, namely in its conflicting use of both direct and representative democracy.
Votes in Eurovision are divided in two equal piles for each participating nation: the jury vote, and the public vote. The jury vote is decided by a jury of the nation’s “music industry professionals” and grants scores of 1 through 10, or the coveted 12 to the favorite competing entries. Then, each nation holds a public televote where people can vote up to 20 times (for 60 cents a vote) and the highest scorers are awarded the same scores of 1-12.
Before 1998, most points were decided by jury; from ‘97-’08 televotes were the only vote; the split jury/public vote has been more or less in place since 2009.
So to go back to the chanting crowd. After the Lithuanian jury vote is in, Catherine Tate delivers the final jury points from the UK, leaving Sweden with 340 points and Israel, at a distant second with 177 points from the juries. Finland is in 4th place with 150 jury points and this is important because Finland’s song, Cha Cha Cha by Käärijä, is what the crowd is all riled up about. See Sweden’s entry, Tattoo by previous Eurovision winner Loreen, is a great song and Loreen is a mesmerizing performer, but it’s kind of a standard pop anthem and certainly not as strong as her previous hit Euphoria. But Cha Cha Cha is a certified banger in this kind of indescribable genre-bending way and when Käärijä pops out of a wooden crate in his puffy green leather bolero jacket grabs the pink leashes of four smiling cha-cha dancers while singing, you can feel the energy from him, the crowd, and everyone else watching in their living rooms pouring through your TV screen.
After the jury votes, the public votes are announced from the bottom of the scoreboard up and Finland is awarded 376 points from televoters and surges to the top spot. The excitement is palpable… until Sweden pulls it out with 243 televote points, meaning that in total Tattoo edges out Cha Cha Cha by just 57 points despite having over twice the points from the jury. So we’re all sitting in my living room, drunk by this point and pretty happy with the spectacle. We declare Käärijä the people’s champion but the feeling is a bit dejected, it feels a bit unfair.
And this is what is so interesting about Eurovision. It has the trappings of democracy and international diplomacy but falls apart when you peek inside. People are often confused by the fact that countries like the UK, Israel, Australia, and Switzerland are involved because they’re not in the EU, or in Israel and Australia’s case on the continent. But Eurovision is not an EU venture, it is run by the European Broadcasting Union, an industry group of public service broadcasters that is able to make and break its own rules about who is included in Eurovision. For instance, Russia was kicked out of the competition last year following its incursion into Ukrainian territory but Israel and Azerbaijan are still allowed to compete with no recognition from the EBU of their religious and ethnic violence against Palestinians and Armenians respectively.
The national juries themselves are a strange parody of representative democracy. They are made up of “music industry professionals” which sounds good on the surface, but music industry reps and the general public can have sharply contrasting motivations. Cha Cha Cha is a bop, a banger, and, to borrow a Briticism, a certified christmas cracker, but it is also a genre-bending pop-punk tune with Finnish lyrics about binge drinking piña coladas. It makes sense that music industry folks would rather choose Loreen’s drag-show ready English language top 40 torch song. It isn’t what I want, but the jury isn’t required to care about what I want.
But when you give people the illusion of democracy, they can’t help but long for it to be real. Those folks in the stadium chanting “CHA CHA CHA!” sounded like they wanted either victory for our bääby böy or Graham Norton’s blood. This happens in actual purported democracies as well. If elected representatives are paler, maler, staler, richer, or more likely to be landowners than their constituencies their interests are probably different than the people they represent. Then we get elected officials who try to legislate trans people and abortion rights out of existence, who let people get away with actual murder in the subway, expel trans and Black legislators, stand silently alongside racist protestors, and pit unhoused people and refugees against one another. Yep, that’s where this ended up. But hey, go make yourself one or several piña coladas, listen to Cha Cha Cha and Tattoo and All the OtherBops from Eurovision this year, demand more from your democracy, and enjoy this pic of me in my paper mâché Käärijä cosplay.
