Vienna: Competition starts Tuesday, May 12, at the Eurovision Song Contest, with divisions over Israel’s participation hanging over the 70th birthday of the over-the-top pop music extravaganza.
Host city Vienna has been bedecked in hearts and the contest’s “United by Music” motto for a week in which singers and bands from 35 countries will compete onstage for the continent’s musical crown. But five countries — Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland — are boycotting to protest Israel’s inclusion.
The boycott was largely based on Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and allegations that it ran a rule-breaking marketing campaign to get votes for its contestant.
A New York Times report on Monday, May 11, revealed that Israel spent at least USD 1 million on marketing for Eurovision, including over USD 8,00,000 in advertisements around the 2024 Malmö contest, partly funded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government office, which encouraged people to vote for their nation’s contestant, Yuval Raphael.
Although it prohibited viewers from casting votes for their own country’s contestant, Eurovision allowed people to vote 20 times. Completely using it to their advantage, the Israeli government uploaded multilingual ads urging viewers to vote up to 20 times, with Netanyahu himself sharing voting graphics on Instagram, NYT found.
While publicly such ads were displayed, Israeli embassies on the sidelines reportedly pressured European broadcasters to keep Israel in the contest as pro-Palestinian protests and an anti-Israel narrative gained momentum.
If just some thousand people cast 20 votes each, it could have gotten her the 47,000-plus votes. However, the report said that Raphael did not even require all those votes. She only needed to defeat the Ukrainian group that came second with approximately 9,620 votes. Only a few hundred people voting en masse would be enough to secure Raphael’s victory.
‘Motivated diaspora and great song’
Her ballad “New Day Will Rise” received a mere 60 points from the Eurovision juries, who declared Austria’s song as the best, giving it 258 points.
The scoreboard changed drastically when voting opened to the public, and Raphael soon soared to the top with 297 points. Immediately, fans of the show began speculating that Israeli bots helped with the vote and whether the Israeli government’s advertisement campaign influenced the win, despite Eurovision maintaining political neutrality.
Organisers of the contest went above and beyond to assure the public that there were no irregularities in the voting. But they did not release voting data and issue an outside review, the NYT reported. The organisation stated that releasing the data “would undermine the contest’s security.”
Martin Green, the contest’s director, said Israel’s win was a result of “motivated diaspora” and a great song. It “can’t be won on the public vote alone, obviously,” he said.
Eurovision did ban what it described as “disproportionate” promotion campaigns specifically undertaken by “third parties, including governments.”
It also lowered the voting limit to 10 per person.
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