Eurovision Song Contest

Dear trusted and treasured Eurovision Song Contest community,

The EBU has listened to and engaged closely in the conversations among Members, our fans and in the media following this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).

I want to again congratulate the winner JJ and the team from ORF. His performance and song rightly, clearly and validly won the Contest and we want to make sure any ancillary conversations do not overshadow this epic achievement.

The ESC voting system includes multiple security layers and a comprehensive set of rules to ensure that a valid result is generated. Our voting partner - Once Germany GmbH - uses redundant systems and multiple platforms to ensure the correct delivery of votes to the central system.

For the Eurovision Song Contest, specially designed systems are used to monitor and prevent fraud. Additionally, more than 60 individuals in Cologne and several others in Vienna and Amsterdam monitor the voting process in each country and maintain direct contact with telecommunication and broadcasting partners globally. All results are verified through an 8-eye principle by the CEO and senior employees of Once, who collectively have over 40 years of voting experience.

Independent compliance monitor EY oversees and authenticates the results. Every decision related to the outcomes is documented and assessed. The entire process, including the result calculation of the platform and the voting results is thoroughly reviewed and verified by EY.

All audience voting, be it SMS, call or online shows evidence of the motivation of communities or diasporas around certain contestants. This can be for many reasons including personal attributes, back stories, geographic affiliations and current affairs. Historically the ESC has been as open to this as other singing and music competitions and reality television.

Every year the Reference Group for the Contest, which contains representatives from and acts on behalf of our Members, studies the data provided by our voting partner Once to make recommendations of any actions available to us to ensure our rules and systems remain fail safe and take into account contemporary external factors such as advances in technology and external influences. This process will happen as it always does in June this year.

Alongside the discussions of the Reference Group, one aspect the EBU will be looking at is the promotion of our acts by their delegations and associated parties. Such promotion is allowed under our rules and acts to celebrate the artists, increase their profile and launch future careers – it’s very much part of the music industry - but we want to ensure that such promotion is not disproportionally affecting the natural mobilization of communities and diasporas we see in all entertainment audience voting.

Another example is the number of votes we allow per person – 20 per payment method. This is designed to ensure that audiences of all ages can vote for more than one of their favourite songs and there is no current evidence that it disproportionally effects the final result – but the question has been asked and so we will look at it.

The EBU and I will be, as we always do, engaging our Members for their views on this and other matters.

I’ll end as I began, by congratulating JJ and ORF who won the Eurovision Song Contest 2025.

Best wishes,

Martin Green CBE, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, European Broadcasting Union

Despite calls from some public broadcasters to exclude Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest due to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, reports suggest that Germany played a decisive role in ensuring Israel’s continued participation.

According to revelations by journalist Dr. Martin Gak in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, the German public broadcaster ARD threatened to withdraw from the contest if the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) decided to exclude Israel.

Gak, citing a source within the EBU, claims that ARD exerted strong pressure on other member broadcasters, making it clear that any decision to bar Israel would result in Germany pulling out as well. It is worth noting that Germany is the most populous country participating in Eurovision, a member of the EBU and one of the Big Five, and also pays the highest participation fee among all competing nations.

The national broadcasters for Spain and Belgium have complained to the competition's organisers after Israel came second and won the public vote by a landslide.

Hey everyone, here's this year's version of the alternative results in which each country hands out points from zero to twenty-five.

As is tradition at this point, Germany gets a better placement. This year going up seven (!) places, sharing the record of biggest jump with France 2023. The biggest losers are Greece and the United Kingdom, dropping four places overall. Switzerland is a mixed bag, they are the new jury winner with this system and aren't last place in the televote anymore either! However being 23rd in the televote doesn't save them from dropping four places in the overall ranking as well.

Is the EBU going to ban Spain do you think?

After trying and failing to steal Eurovision last year, Israel came back with a plan to rig the competition at the second attempt, but outrageously it was foiled by Austria. Israel wanted to take Eurovision like it was a house owned by Palestinians, but Austria had the audacity to win Israel's prize and it did not even resort to cheating. Truly, this is the worst thing Austria has done since it gave the world Hitler.

Eurovision seemed to be going so well when organisers hid the fact everyone hates Israel by replacing boos with AI-generated cheers. You know those divorced men who can't get a girlfriend so they hire someone to be their date? It was kind'a like that. Israel paid for a fake audience so it didn't look like a massive loser.

Obviously, a fake audience wasn't going to be enough to win, but Israel had other tricks up its sleeve. It was supposed to keep the next part of its plan secret, but the people who brag about their war crimes on TikTok aren't the brightest bunch. Israelis couldn't help boasting of their heroic efforts which involved using multiple credit cards to vote hundreds of times in different countries. Israel has demanded an investigation into how Austria won, even though Israel cheated.

During the second semi-final of Eurovision 2025, RTVE commentators Tony Aguilar and Julia Varela discussed the need to open a debate about Israel's presence in the festival. They highlighted that the Gaza invasion by Tel Aviv has resulted in over 50,000 civilian casualties, including nearly 16,000 children. They used the introduction video of Yuval Raphael's song, the Israeli representative, to clarify the public broadcaster's stance, one of the few openly advocating for a review of the Middle Eastern country's participation in the contest.

The Israeli public broadcaster protested, and on Friday, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) threatened RTVE with "punitive fines" if any reference to the situation in Gaza is repeated. "It is essential that your commentators adhere to these rules without exception [...] to preserve Eurovision's apolitical nature and comply with the ethics and standards established in the rules. We expect full cooperation from RTVE to prevent recurrence. Any further breach may result in punitive fines according to the rules," warned a statement signed by the president of the Eurovision Reference Group, Swiss Bakel Walden, and Swedish Martin Osterdahl, the festival's executive supervisor.

#low-effort-shitpost

Stolen from Mastodon.

Don't stop boycotting, but it may be a factor in what we saw today, at the very least it's helping the Israeli government's advertising to be more effective. ESC really needs to do something (ideally ban Israel) because Israel has made Eurovision​ even more explicitly political than it was before.

HELL YEAH!

Screw you Israel! Even with your coordinated global voting you couldn't win! Austria's singer deserved it, great vocals!

Is it too late to vote for the Baby Lasagna x Käärijä mashup to win it all?

Greetings from Germany

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/184455

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