Eurovision says it’s “apolitical.” History says otherwise.

Politics on Eurovision isn’t new. It’s been part of it almost from the start.

The annual Eurovision Song Contest kicked off yesterday and is bracing for protests and audience disruptions over Israel’s inclusion in the event as its war in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack rages on.

The song contest will be thousands of miles away — in Malmo, Sweden — but fury over the war is expected to be palpable in the small Scandinavian city, whose population will swell with both Eurovision fans and protesters. Over 1,000 artists in the host country signed a letter calling for Israel’s disqualification for its “brutal warfare in Gaza,” according to the Guardian, and pro-Palestinian groups are lobbying state broadcasters not to air the event and calling on artists to refuse to participate.

Already, Swedish pop star Eric Saade appeared wearing a keffiyeh — a traditional scarf that has come to symbolize resistance to Israel’s incursion into Gaza — around his wrist during a performance on Tuesday night. A spokesperson for European Broadcasting Union (EBU) — which organizes the event — issued their “regrets” over the decision, according to the BBC. Saade has appeared as a Eurovision competitor before but was a guest performer last night.

Politics intruding on Eurovision isn’t new, despite its stated desire to stay above the fray.

In 2022, the contest disqualified Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Nonetheless, the EBU has rejected demands from pro-Palestinian activists, maintaining that it is a music event that keeps political messages away from the stage. Sweden will bring additional police from Denmark and Norway to Malmo, and the Eurovision Song Contest is expected to continue with the usual participants, including Israel, which has won Eurovision four times since joining the contest in 1973.

The EBU did require Israel to revise its entry this year, though, which was a song initially called “October Rain,” featuring the lyrics “those that write history, stand with me.” The song appeared to be a reference to Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 people and led to the kidnapping of some 240, dozens of whom are still held hostage.

The reference to the attack was deemed too political by the EBU, and thus ineligible for the competition. Israel initially refused to sanitize its entry, even threatening to pull out of the competition, but revised it after involvement from President Isaac Herzog. The new song, which will be performed by Eden Golan, is now a romantic ballad entitled “Hurricane,” and the opening line was changed to “writer of my symphony, play with me.”

The controversy over Israel’s song and the protests looming over this year’s event underscore how much politics encroaches on an event that seeks to promote a utopian vision of global comity. But as Tess Megginson, a PhD candidate studying European history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, argues, the song contest, founded during the Cold War with seven European countries and initially excluding the Soviet Union, has always been a space for political performance. In an interview with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, she explained that while some of today’s controversy is unique, the contest had some of its most contentious political moments after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to a longer version of Megginson’s interview and highlights from Eurovision on Today, Explained. —Haleema Shah, producer

Sean Rameswaram

You wrote in the Washington Post that politics at Eurovision is nothing new, using the ’90s as an example.

Tess Megginson

I would argue the 1990s are actually some of the most political years of the contest, and this actually isn’t always a bad thing.

As soon as you have the Eastern European countries start joining, hosts are talking about welcome to the rest of Europe, and now we’re finally unified. And you have all these songs about peace and unity and breaking down walls. Some of these do quite well in the contest, some of them don’t. In 1990, the first competition held in Eastern Europe, in Zagreb, the winning entry was Italy with “Insieme: 1992.” The hook in the chorus is “unite, unite Europe,” and it got a very good reception and won the competition.

It is a really beautiful time in the contest, but also in the ’90s you have the Yugoslav wars. And this is the first time that we actually see a country banned from the competition. Yugoslavia was banned from the contest shortly after the 1992 competition because of the siege of Sarajevo. UN sanctions are imposed against Yugoslavia, and Bosnia is able to participate in the competition, but Yugoslavia cannot. Even though Bosnia is not participating with a song entry, they’re still able to vote in the contest [and] call into the contest while under siege.

Sean Rameswaram

Wow.

Tess Megginson

The phone line initially disconnects and it goes dead. And there’s just this silence that falls over the audience. Soon they’re able to reconnect, and there’s a loud applause and cheering from the audience as they’re able to give their points for the contest. It’s a really beautiful moment of solidarity for people who were at war and under occupation. And it’s something that, even though it’s a very political moment, it’s quite a beautiful moment in the contest’s history.

Sean Rameswaram

These political moments we’re talking about — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism, the genocide in Bosnia — they all happened on the continent of Europe. But here, now, in 2024, we’ve got this controversy and calls for a boycott that relate to something happening in the Middle East. Is there a precedent for that at Eurovision?

Tess Megginson

Yeah. Boycotts in Eurovision are almost as old as the contest itself, starting in the 1970s. In 1975, Turkey invaded Cyprus, and Greece boycotted the contest. The following year, Greece submits a song that is a very anti-war song and clearly referencing Turkey’s presence in Cyprus, and Turkey boycotts the contest. So that’s kind of the first example we see of these big boycotts.

More recently [there have] been calls to boycott Azerbaijan because of their treatment of their viewers who vote for Armenia. They’ve threatened to block the Armenian broadcast before. And of course, when they hosted the contest in 2012, there was a big outcry because they displaced a lot of people living in a community in Baku because they were building a stadium just to host the Eurovision Song Contest.

Sean Rameswaram

Wow.

Tess Megginson

And then of course, Russia’s the big one that you see a lot in the conversation because of its invasion of Ukraine, finally banned from the competition in 2022.

Sean Rameswaram

It sounds like it’s par for the course to have this level of controversy and calls for boycotts and tensions between nations at Eurovision. Does that make this current controversy less exceptional?

Tess Megginson

Not necessarily. I think there’s also been a long and unique history with Israel’s participation in the contest. As the first non-European country to participate, it’s also had relative success since it joined.

It’s won the contest four times and hosted it three times. All the way back in 1978, we started seeing these controversies arise with Israel’s participation. In 1978, they actually won the competition, but in Jordan, which was a member of the EBU, although not participating in the contest, they didn’t air the Israel entry. And when it became clear that Israel was going to win the contest, they cut the broadcast short and announced Belgium as the winner in Jordan.

Sean Rameswaram

What? They just lied?!

Tess Megginson

Yep, they lied to people in Jordan and said Belgium had won the contest. I don’t know when they found out that wasn’t true.

Sean Rameswaram

When they got Wikipedia.

Tess Megginson

Yeah. Pre-Internet, it was a lot easier to get away with that sort of thing.

Sean Rameswaram

How does Eurovision typically handle the boycotts and the tensions between these nations?

Tess Megginson

Not very well. They officially market themselves as an apolitical contest. So when politics enter the contest, they are not happy about it. One kind of fun example is in 2015, they introduced what they called “anti-booing technology.”

You couldn’t hear the crowd booing the Russian entry during the contest. I don’t think it’s been used since then, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a similar thing this year.

And another thing is fines — they do really like to fine their members. In 2019, when Israel hosted the contest, there were calls to boycott and move the contest out of Israel. Icelandic performers held up Palestinian flags and the Icelandic broadcaster ended up getting a huge fine from the EBU for doing that.

Sean Rameswaram

Do you think Eurovision this year will end up transcending our current geopolitical situation?

Tess Megginson

There are a couple signs we can look for to see how Europeans are reacting to Israel’s participation. The first is going to be the live audience reaction. This is going to be more difficult for us to see as viewers; we’re probably going to have to rely on things like social media and journalists on the ground to hear how the audience is reacting to Israel participating.

But we’re also going to see this maybe with the other performers, if they, say, wave Palestinian flags like we saw in 2019. Also, when the votes are given out at the end of the competition, are people going to boo countries that give Israel top votes? We’ll have to see.

A second thing, of course, is the popular vote. Will people vote for Israel or will this be a protest vote against them? If there’s a big difference between the jury vote for Israel and the popular vote, that’s probably a sign that people are not voting for Israel because they don’t agree with what they’re doing in Gaza.

The third thing to see is viewership. If the boycott is effective, there’ll probably be a stark decline in viewership in certain countries. Obviously, there are other factors at play here. So if a country, a participant, doesn’t make the finals, there could be a decline in viewership because of that, but if we see a significant decline, I would probably argue that it’s the boycott.

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