Eurovision is a great distraction from everything that matters in life. It is utterly unimportant, gloriously dreadful to listen to or watch, and all the more compelling for it. The show has developed over the years from something sort of wholesome to a sexually suggestive celebration of camp, of cross dressing, shouty singing, and bizarre fever-dream staging. It is utterly bonkers, excessively long, and continues to bamboozle and entertain in equal measure through its attempts to be political and not political, uniting and dividing, musical and cacophonic, all at once. Nothing about it makes sense, and nothing should. Least of all the scoreboard.
This year was no different. The run-up to the show featured the now usual attempts to belittle and exclude the Israeli entry. One year they complained the song was "political” and changed a few words. Then they complained that because Israel’s song was too popular with the public, the entire voting system needed to be changed.
While geopolitical tensions cast a heavy shadow over this year’s contest, Israel soldiered on as ever. Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain all opted out, while other singers made a point of snubbing the Israeli team when pushed to talk about their song in public.
The eventual winner, Bulgaria’s Dara, though, had quietly "liked” an Instagram clip of Israeli representative Noam Bettan’s rehearsal of his song Michelle early in May. Dara’s simple, public digital interaction stood out as a clear choice to evaluate a fellow competitor strictly through an artistic lens rather than a political one. So when she ended up beating Israel at the last moment with a massive audience vote, many Israelis forgave her and settled for an impressive second place, once again delivered by the popular viewer vote over the “expert jury” votes of the participating countries.
It would have been satisfyingly wonderful if Israel had won, seeing all those nasties who went out of their way to try to ostracise the country having to swallow their pride and fly to the Jewish state, or worse, cut off their nose jobs to spite their filler-plumped faces by boycotting the competition once again.
To my ear, Israel’s song was infinitely better than the weird one that triumphed. But what the hell do I know? Bunga Bunga (or whatever the Bulgarian song was called) was apparently not an ode to the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s debauched private parties, but it did sound like a Cheeky Girls B-side. Still, this is Eurovision, and the whole point is that there is no point. The voting is more complicated than Proportional Representation, and the audience vote is so opaque nobody seems to know how it works or doesn’t.
It is another mysterious triumph of this inexplicable TV format that the seemingly never-ending section of the show, which is essentially a convoluted spreadsheet, somehow manages to feel exciting. One suspects the voting system is designed more around tension than fairness.
Bearing in mind the entire voting system was redesigned last year when Israel did frustratingly well in the audience vote, it seems that maybe this time the EBU will just have to admit that maybe the European voting public actually like Israel’s musical abilities. Or perhaps they secretly really love the country and voted for it en masse to show their support in the face of unrelentingly negative media coverage and government-level actions against the country. Either way, it’s a win for Israel, in so far as far as not winning can be.
Maybe the EBU will decide once again to reinvent its voting and scoring system, until Israel literally can’t do well at all. A bit like when the Irish government tried to change the legal definition of genocide retroactively just so that Israel could be found guilty of it.
One thing remains reliably and comfortingly certain: the UK did dreadfully, coming last with just one point. The result was deserved. We’re like the control data that proves the system is calibrated correctly. Not everyone can do well, and our presence at the bottom of the table reassures the audience that everything is running as it should.
You could say that there’s only one thing worse than constantly coming last, and that’s constantly coming second. Israel has done that four times now, in 1982 with Avi Toledano singing Hora, in 1983 with Ofra Haza singing Chai, in 2025 with Yuval Raphael singing New Day Will Rise, and now this year with Noam Bettan singing Michelle. But several of those songs have actually become enduring and much loved-anthems for Israelis and Jews around the world. Besides, the UK has come second 16 times, so even on that score Israel beats us.
There’s always the temptation to read into these things. Did they punish us for Brexit (again)? Do people secretly love Israel? Did Dara win karma points for her Insta like? But in reality, none of it means a thing, and that’s part of the charm. Like the royal family, if we had to design the system now from scratch, it wouldn’t look anything like it does. But having somehow hung on for years and morphed into this weird, slightly corrupt, sexually questionable display of sparkles and inexplicable ceremonies, it makes us love it and love to hate it all at once.
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