Dazzling Delta eclipses the Eurovision drama

There’s no such thing as a cheesy little song contest.

With boycotts, political fury and previous calls to investigate voting patterns, Eurovision has become a crucible of controversy.

It’s not the first in the song contest’s 70-year-old history, but the temperature and the volume has been turned up, and we’re not talking about the smoke machines and amps.

Eurovision’s slogan may be united by music, but it is, this week, the stage for division. Perhaps that shouldn’t be unexpected in a format that literally pits nations against one another, and where flags are waved with as much fervour as any patriotic parade.

But unity is something Australia’s entrant this year, Delta Goodrem, was keen to emphasise.

Asked by ABC’s Hamish McDonald if she was paying any attention to the political furore surrounding the event, hosted this year in Vienna, Goodrem replied, “I’ve haven’t dived into it.

“For me, I think from starting young, I made it pretty clear very young that I was in this for unifying through music, and continue that path of staying true to my belief in the love of music and the power of music.

“I stay true to stay in my lane and getting in the car and putting the roof down and getting the hair in my face.”

Goodrem will perform her new song Eclipse tomorrow morning Australia time, in the second of two semi-finals which will determine the final line-up vying to be this year’s winner. Goodrem appeared to be hopeful of a high finish if not the win, and so is Australia.

In more recent years, Australia has given the platform of competing in Eurovision to up-and-coming artists but has previously sent established music stars such as Guy Sebastian, Kate Miller-Heidke and Jessica Mauboy as representatives.

Our best result was in 2016 when Dami Im placed second in the final after coming first in her semi-final. Goodrem could do one better and win, and has been perceived as a strong contender alongside singers from Iceland and Greece by Eurovision commentators.

Australia’s direct participation in Eurovision is relatively green, having officially joined as a competitor in 2015 after decades of enthusiastic involvement from the sidelines. With the nation’s large European diaspora communities, the contest has been a viewing favourite since 1983 when SBS first started to broadcast the event.

It was, at times, rocky at the beginning, but a decade on, the antipodean Australia has largely been accepted by the Eurovision community, and there are even whispers that Canada might soon join the throng.

Eurovision may be known for the theatricality and spectacle of its acts, some genuinely impressive, others cringingly so.

But for the kitschy fun and good times, it is also a projection of a country’s soft power. Just like the Olympics, it’s an opportunity to flex your muscles in an international forum where hundreds of millions of people are watching.

Particularly for a small country, the chance for wider recognition can be invaluable.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that politics has infiltrated the contest this year, just as it has many times throughout its history. Eurovision has often taken on shades of the political context of the day.

In the mid-1970s, Greece and Turkey took turns boycotting the event — Greece in 1975 when Turkey was invited to take part, and then Turkey in 1976 when Greece returned and its entrant made references to the conflict over Cyprus.

There are lingering theories that Franco Francisco rigged the votes for a Spanish victory in 1968 while Portugal’s song in 1974 (the year ABBA won with Waterloo) was used as a signal to trigger a military coup d’etat.

Georgia was refused entry in 2009 when its song was deemed derogatory towards Vladimir Putin, but by 2022, the tables had turned and Russia was expelled over its invasion of Ukraine.

That same year, Ukraine’s competitor, Kalush Orchestra, riding on a wave of international sympathy for the beleaguered nation and victim of Putin’s aggression, won. Whether or not it was the best, a subjective question at the best of times, wasn’t pertinent. What mattered was that Eurovision was putting its support behind Ukraine.

It was Russia’s expulsion that set the ground for the mire Eurovision finds itself in today, having set the precedent.

Five countries have boycotted this year’s contest in protest over the continued participation of Israel and its military’s actions in Gaza, which have resulted in the deaths of more than 70,000 Palestinians. Israel maintains that the conflict is a defensive one triggered by the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 during which more than 1200 people were killed.

Eurovision is run by the European Broadcasting Union and its members are participating countries’ public broadcasters. There are five majors — France, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy — that provide the bulk of the funds to mount the event.

Spain is one of the five boycotting countries (the others being Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia and the Netherlands), and its non-involvement is costly to the EBU.

It’s not only the Gaza war that has stirred opposition to Israel in Eurovision. There was also the matter of unusual voting patterns during last year’s contest.

The Israeli entrant, Yuval Raphael, finished second on the overall count after she attracted a disproportionately high amount of public votes. According to Reuters, 83 per cent of Raphael’s votes came from public support versus 17 per cent from the jury. Raphael had been ranked 14th by the professional jury.

For comparison’s sake, the winner, Austria, garnered 41 per cent of their overall points from the public vote.

Earlier this week, The New York Times published an investigation which found that the Israeli government directly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing and promotional campaigns encouraging diaspora communities around Europe to cast all of their 20 allowed votes for the Israeli entrant. Government lobbying is frowned upon.

It was in this febrile environment of the Middle East conflict and the voting controversy, that some EBU members had argued for Israel’s exclusion from this year’s contest.

There had been a secret ballot cast late last year to decide and the result of that was that Israel was allowed to remain, but the some of the voting rules had changed.

“We saw some activity last year which we could describe as disproportionate marketing and promotional activity that we felt was out of sync with the nature of the show so we changed some rules in about that,” Eurovision director Martin Green told Reuters, without specifying it as a response to Israel.

The previous allotment of 20 votes per person in the public balloting had been halved to 10, and what was a 100 per cent public vote for the semi-finals result would now be split 50-50 public and jury selection.

On the eve of the semi-finals, Israel’s ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism released a “pre-emptive” statement against the what it said was a campaign to discredit Israel. After the first semi-final, this year’s Israel entrant, Noam Batten, qualified for the finals, which will be broadcast in Australia on Sunday morning.