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.”
For the most part it can be great entertainment and i used to enjoy it for many years. Thinks started to become slightly weird for me, when i learned about the regime in Azerbaijan and not remembering anything to that extent being said in the mainstream media in Germany (or at least that i noticed) when it was there in 2012. Then things got more weird as Russia had annexed Crimea but was still allowed to participate, with there being some mention of it at least.
So i remember many years where politics did not play as much of a role and the “drama” was about the acts themselves or the national preselections. The preselections are always a drama in Germany as the German broadcasters work hard to get the most bland, boring and forgettable acts on instead of having any chance at winning.
It is a lot of fun, if it isn’t tainted by criminal regimes using the stage to get legitimacy. In that sense ignorance can be a bliss and i don’t know if i was just blissful because of that in the earlier years or if there was “a good old time”.