National broadcasters for Spain and Belgium have now complained to the competition’s organisers, the European Broadcasting Union, after Israel won the public vote by a large margin.
RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster, and VRT, the Flemish broadcasting company, are demanding that organisers investigate the televoting system, which allows voters at home to vote up to 20 times for a small cost charged to each vote by text or phone call.
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The EBU confirmed that RTVE and VRT had been in contact and said it took the complaints “seriously”.
Martin Green, the director of Eurovision, said: “It is important to emphasise that the voting operation for the Eurovision Song Contest is the most advanced in the world and each country’s result is checked and verified by a huge team of people to exclude any suspicious or irregular voting patterns.”
Eject Israel from the EBU, they’re not better than Russia at this point.
They’re much worse.
The trouble is, of course, that the primary sponsor of the competition is Moroccanoil: an Israeli firm.
yeah it’s all about that sweet sweet cash. I don’t quite understand how such a minor cosmetics company is able to afford such a big sponsorship for that many years. You’d think L’Oreal or similar international brands have this kind of marketing budget.
i thought that the song Israel competed with is good music, the singer is talented, and in a vacuum it deserves being around the top, but the whole backstory of sending a survivor of the music festival attack that initiated the war just makes it unpalatable.
letting them take part in the competition is also a huge additional stress for security, logistics and broadcast, to avoid physical attacks (several were thwarted during the israeli performances), avoid props like palestinian flag (like when the icelandic band brought one in rotterdam), booing (like in malmö where they had to introduce a delay to be able to remove anything from the final signal)… all that trouble must still be worth it.
It seems like such an easy call - give anyone who might bring unnecessary political pressure a ‘time out’. Could keep it entirely neutral like that if they wish to appear above the fray.
Would be better than what they did as allowing Israel this year can easily be seen as a very political endorsement.