It is one of the unwritten laws of the annual celebration of silliness and tight trousers that is Eurovision: neighbouring countries, and blocs with strong cultural and political ties – think the Nordics, Greece and Cyprus, the former Soviet states – tend to mark each other high.
The song contest’s “neighbourhood voting” has even been the subject of learned studies. But its role has rarely been as explicitly acknowledged as this year, when the head of Moldova’s public broadcaster felt he had to resign because his country’s jury gave only three points to next-door Romania.
