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.”
I was wondering about the result because the politically situation always influences voting behavior for the ESC. Israel is currently not very popular (and for good reason) so I would have expected that they come in last yet they obliterated everyone else in the audience vote (just like they illegally obliterated Gaza). This did not add up and manipulation was the only reasonable explaination
That’s how it works in a vote. You have 24 countries. Votes are spread across all of them. It doesn’t require more than maybe 10% of the vote for one country to get 12 points. With some mobilisation by stupid Israel-supporters and targetted ads by Netanyahu and his crime gang, it’s not that urealistic to get max points, even if the last 90% of potential voters hate the regime.
I would not go as far that manipulation is the only reasonable explanation. Certainly Israeli lobby groups will have mobilized their people to vote extensively as participation in international events and the image of strong support are crucial for claiming legitimacy. As the article discusses the system of allowing up to 20 votes per number is favoring the ferverous.
There is three considerations from my side that i think need to be cleared:
To add to your No 1:
I’ve heard from other people (who don’t use a good AdBlocker) that they got shown ads for the Israeli song surrounding videos about Eurovision on YouTube. Someone also mentioned that in the ads he saw the song itself got advertised, it did not explicitly mention that it is a song from Israel. I use UBlockOrigin and therefore did not see these ads myself.
I don’t care who does it - I think that blatant advertising should not be allowed. Other countries are already disadvantaged by the comparatively huge costs to partake in the song contest.
People who oppose Israel’s participation didn’t watch and didn’t vote. That alone will have had an influence on the result. Even if they did vote, their votes were spread across dozens of other candidates.
Edit: I should’ve been more precise and said “many people”. Wishful thinking on my part, I suppose.
Why would people not watch? Do you think Israel has such a huge influence on people that they’d outright ignore watching the show? I would argue that’s not a factor because there were people in the arena who booed Israel. They paid money to see it live. I didn’t like Israel participating, I still watched it because Eurovision is not about Israel.
That’s a roundabout way of saying you think Israel’s song was popular among people. I’m supposed to believe Netherlands, who just had a massive protest about Israel, gave maximum points to Israel? Norway, who is known to be pretty anti-Israel, gave almost max points to Israel? Same with France, UK etc. Countries that have polls showing the majority being against what Israel is doing turn around and give max (or close to max) points to Israel? How? Why?
Well, basically. It doesn’t take more than, say, 8-10% of Dutch voters willing to vote 20 times to secure 12 points for Israel. The remaining people might be in staunch opposition but can’t counter this unless they mobilise behind one particular country - and no regular individual cares about Eurovision that much. Besides, far-right parties in Europe generally get between 20-45% of votes in all countries and these people usually support Israel and are all about identity politics.
I did not watch (and haven’t since 2023) and many others didn’t either. I am a bit disappointed in us that we did not even reach you with our calls to participate in the boycott, that’s our bad.
Maybe you’re seriously overestimating the importance of your boycott?
2022 - 161 million views
2023 - 162 million views
2024 - 163 million views
Seems like your boycott has had no impact.
Yeah, it’s pretty sad.
Because any pro Israeli types voted directly for Israel,.and voted as. many times as possible in as many ways as possible. even if they were not watching it.
I’d understand that if it happened in one maybe two countries, but this happened across multiple countries where most people don’t condone the actions of Isreal. I’m not going just believe that some kind of a perfect storm gave Isreal the most televotes.
I would think the very people who watch and participate are exactly the ones who would oppose Israel. It’s a very woke broadcast.
I did not watch (and haven’t since 2023) and many others didn’t either. I am a bit disappointed in us that we did not even reach you with our calls to participate in the boycott, that’s our bad.
Got any sources that don’t include your orifices?
I did not watch (and haven’t since 2023) and many others didn’t either. I am a bit disappointed in us that we did not even reach you with our calls to participate in the boycott, that’s our bad.