The Eurovision Song Contest is intended to celebrate music and cultural diversity, but inevitably, politics creep in and challenge the contest's claim to be neutral.
Artists from 37 countries will compete in this year's competition, which will begin next week in Basel, Switzerland, with the grand finale taking place on May 17.
Politics are officially banned from the event, but organizers will have to roll up their sleeves, as they do every year, to ensure that the festivities are not overshadowed by tensions over culture wars and conflicts such as Israel's war in Gaza. Experts agree that this is a major challenge.
"This event is impossible to depoliticize," Dean Vuletic, a historian and author of "Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest," told AFP. "It's absolutely impossible," agreed Jess Carniel, an associate professor at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. "When everyone is competing under their own national flag (...) there are always political undercurrents."
Since its inception nearly 70 years ago, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which has organized Eurovision, has insisted that it is apolitical. But politics always creeps in, from an Austrian representative protesting against Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain in 1969 to calls for European unity when Eastern European countries were invited to the contest after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early XNUMXs.
Mass protests
Until 1998, when Eurovision stopped requiring contestants to sing in their national language, the political sentiments expressed in some songs received little attention. In 1976, Greece submitted a song criticizing the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, "but it was performed in Greek, so it didn't get much attention," Lisanne Wilken, an associate professor of European studies at Aarhus University in Denmark, told AFP.
Since then, increased media attention and the ability to broadcast in English have made Eurovision very accessible to those who want to get noticed, she said.
Recently, manifestations of political condemnation have certainly not gone unnoticed. Russia war in Ukraine dominated the event in 2022, when they won the competition Ukraine, and Russia was banned from participating, and again in 2023. Last year, the event was overshadowed by Israel's war in the Gaza Strip, and thousands of people in the Swedish city of Malmö protested against the participation of Israeli representative Eden Golan.
Demonstrations against Israel's participation are also planned this year, when its representative Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the deadly Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on October 2023, 7, which triggered the war in the Gaza Strip, will perform her song "New Day Will Rise."
New rules
However, experts do not expect the same scale of protests as last year. One reason, according to Vuletic, is that "last year's campaign against Israel was not successful, no country boycotted Eurovision because of Israel" and the country scored a lot of points.
Experts also say new rules introduced by the EBU could also have an impact. The organizers have adopted a new policy that prohibits contestants from appearing with any flags other than those of the country they represent, although they have relaxed restrictions on what flags spectators can carry. They explained that they are trying to “find a balance so that the audience and artists can express their enthusiasm and identity, while providing greater clarity for delegations in official spaces.”
D. The Trump effect?
However, the new policy could backfire, Wilken warned, as a ban on Pride flag-waving could be seen as an incitement to war with the woke.
According to Carniel, the song contest has seen “some backlash against so-called identity politics, with Eurovision being criticized for veering into weird fantasies.” By not allowing contestants to wave Pride flags or display other symbols supporting LGBTQ rights, organizers are trying to attract more people by emphasizing that the contest “is not just for eccentrics.” event".
The United States is not participating in the contest, but experts say President Donald Trump's anti-diversity rhetoric could fuel efforts by conservative forces in Europe to rid Eurovision of its LGBTQ-friendly identity. On the other hand, the Trump administration's attacks on European countries could reinforce the contest's focus on building a common European identity. Carniel believes that, given the current political climate, the idea of a united Europe in a dangerous world resonates strongly.
Viljama Sudikiene (AFP)
