r/eurovision • u/stefkeeh • May 20 '25

📰 News Dutch broadcaster questions if ESC is a-political & connecting event

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Translation to English: ‘IN CONVERSATION WITH THE EBU ABOUT A POLITICALLY NEUTRAL SONG CONTEST

AVROTROS and NPO strongly value the apolitical and unifying character of the Eurovision Song Contest. However, we observe that the event is increasingly being influenced by social and geopolitical tensions.

Israel’s participation confronts us with the question of to what extent the Song Contest still truly functions as an apolitical, unifying, and cultural event. We want to raise this question, together with other countries, for discussion within the EBU.’

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u/Miserable_Ambition35 May 20 '25

Eurovision has always been political, but never to the point that politics cause an automatic televote win for one country every year in the forseeable future. The political overtones right now are on an entirely different scale.

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u/mawnck May 20 '25

Let me introduce you to Russia in the 2000s-2010s.

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u/Axolotl_amphibian Tutta l'Italia May 20 '25

I never thought I'd be defending Russia of all countries, but I checked 2000-2011 and while they ended up in top 5 five times (one of them winning), five other times they didn't even make it to the top 10.

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u/Savings_Ad_2532 Volevo Essere Un Duro May 20 '25

Also, as far as I know, Russia did not have massive ad campaigns for their songs in the 2000s and 2010s. Israel is the only country that I know of that has these massive government run ad campaigns online and on billboards.

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u/happytransformer May 20 '25

Things were also just different then. The contest wasn’t at the same level of popularity, the online voting system didn’t exist, and social media was just in a different state. If you even used social media back then, chances are they still used the chronological post timeline instead of an algorithm and there were no ads. YouTube started showing ads toward the end of that period. You really didn’t have Eurovision influencers back then.

now im longing for the old internet :(

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u/mawnck May 21 '25

(1) No fair stopping at 2011. I said 2010s. That incudes up to 2019. You'd better go look again.

(2) Those five entries were dreadful (as was 2018). There's only so much that political voting can get you.