At 10.55pm on 24 April 1974, Portuguese radio played their entry to that year’s Eurovision song contest – and soldiers took to the streets. The tune by Paulo de Carvalho was the pre-agreed signal to start an armed coup, and for rifle-toting military to rise up against a fascist dictatorship. Citizens flocked to join in and there was so little resistance that flowers were placed in unfired gun barrels (it became known as the Carnation Revolution). It started Portugal’s transformation into a democracy and is surely the only revolution triggered by a crooner with a very large collar.
If you focus entirely on the performances, Eurovision is a bit daft. OK, very daft. According to the results, in 2018 the continent’s finest piece of music featured a woman squawking like a chicken and in 2006 nothing said “credible winner” like five pogoing orcs singing about the “a-rock-alypse”. There are rapping astronauts, competitors who perform as half-animal/half-fruit and multitasking grannies baking bread to Euro-rave.
But Eurovision is also a deeply serious political affair. Time and again, countries (including brutal dictatorships) have used it as an astonishingly effective form of political power – and reinvented themselves in the eyes of the world.
“Even from the very first contest you see politics being played out,” says Dean Vuletic, who created the world’s first university course on Eurovision. “In 1956, the first West German entry was sung by a Jewish Holocaust survivor – a clear attempt to distance themselves from their Nazi past. On day one it’s being used by a country to change their identity on the international stage.”
Ever since, Eurovision has been intrinsically intertwined with international diplomacy. In 1964, Portugal and Spain’s participation – despite being dictatorships – saw protests break out mid-contest, with a banner-toting activist having to be dragged off the stage. In 1969, General Franco’s attempt to use his country’s hosting of Eurovision to (in Vuletic’s words) “whitewash his regime” saw him recruit surrealist art megastar Salvador Dalí to design the publicity materials (ie a bizarre poster with mutant planet-sized lips and a squadron of terrifying, armless monsters). After Turkey invaded Cyprus, Greece hit back via Eurovision, using their 1976 entry to make claims about napalm and mass graves – leading Turkey to boycott the contest. And Portugal’s entry didn’t just set the nation on the road to democracy – it allowed several African countries to become independent, after the Portuguese military withdrew from its overseas territories.
Sometimes, however, Eurovision has been caught up in a clampdown on freedom of expression. In 2009, the Azerbaijani government interrogated 43 people who were found to have voted for bitter rival Armenia – claiming it was a matter of “national security”. It’s just one part of a long Eurovision-based war between the two countries, who have an ongoing territorial dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Eurovision has ramped up tensions between the countries. In 2016, the Armenian entrant caused uproar when she waved the Nagorno-Karabakh flag, prompting the European Broadcast Union (EBU) which runs Eurovision to sanction the Armenian broadcaster for enflaming “the tense situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh region”. In 2009, an image of a monument near Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital city was edited out of the intro to the Armenian performance after Azerbaijan claimed it was an Azerbaijani landmark. The Armenian voting delegation snuck it on to TV by sticking it to the back of their presenter’s clipboard.
Azerbaijan’s Eurovision history is also part of a wider trend – allowing increased freedoms. When it hosted the contest in 2012, despite having an atrocious record of human rights abuses and a government known for suppressing critics, hundreds of citizens were allowed to march through Baku, calling for democracy and freedom of speech. In 2005, when Ukraine hosted, it temporarily loosened entry restrictions for EU citizens – and ended up permanently leaving its borders more open. Conchita Wurst’s 2014 entry provoked homophobic protests from conservative Russian politicians and sparked furious petitions in Belarus, Armenia and Russia demanding she be edited out of the broadcast – yet she won the contest. Her victory may have caused more furore from homophobic Russian MPs, but it also led to the Austrian chancellor announcing his desire to legalise gay marriage.
Wurst’s win did, however, highlight one unfortunate part of the contest: vote-rigging. “A lot of the juries didn’t give Conchita the same number of votes as their public,” says Vuletic. “These jurors did not want to be associated with LGBTQ+ issues, as they feared what the professional consequences could be.” Last year, six national panels’ votes were rejected by the EBU due to “irregularities”, leading to a major rule change to reduce the juries’ influence. According to Jordan “those juries see each other all the time, so it would be very easy for them to do deals. It’s very tricky to prove, but there are certainly some strange patterns, and it’s always the same repeat offenders.”
For all of this, since 2000 Eurovision has supposedly been a non-political contest due to a rule banning explicit political references. It hasn’t exactly worked, given that the 2016 Ukrainian winner was about Russia’s deportation of the Crimean Tatar population in the second world war – resulting in a spiralling battle between the two nations that eventually led Ukraine to forbid Russia’s singer from entering the country. It’s also hard not to suspect that at least some of Europe voted for Ukraine to win last year as an expression of solidarity after Putin’s invasion.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, one of the things that makes Eurovision so captivating is the politics. “It has the power to bring Europe together to express support for a certain issue – be it the rights of sexual minorities or showing solidarity with Ukraine,” says Vuletic. “That’s why Eurovision is much more powerful than other events.”
