Conservative groups are threatening to block Switzerland from hosting next year’s Eurovision by forcing budget referendums on potential host cities, saying the song contest is a “propaganda event” that “celebrates satanism and occultism”.
Switzerland won the right to host the world’s largest live music event after the Swiss singer Nemo triumphed in Sweden with The Code. The cities of Zurich, Geneva, Bern and Basel have all filed applications to host the five-day spectacle.
The Christian conservative Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland (EDU) party, however, has said it will seek to make use of the country’s direct democracy system to put the bidding cities’ loan applications to the vote.
“The Eurovision song contest is a ghastly propaganda occasion”, the EDU said in a social media post on Tuesday. “A country that provides a stage to such disgusting trash won’t elevate its image but merely showcase its own intellectual decline.”
Samuel Kullmann, a senior EDU politician, told the Swiss broadcaster SRF his party was disturbed by Eurovision’s increasing “celebration, or at least tolerance of … satanism and occultism”. “More and more artists present openly occultist messages and underline them with respective symbols,” he said.
The Irish singer Bambie Thug’s stage show at the 2024 contest involved a devil-like horned dancer and a circle of candles containing a pentagram, which in its inverted form is a common satanic symbol.
In the final in Malmö, Nemo became the first non-binary artist to win the contest in its 68-year history with a song celebrating their identity beyond male and female gender norms.
The EDU is a minor political party with only one seat on the Swiss national council, but its calls for referendums have been supported in some cantons by the larger rightwing Swiss People’s party (SVP) and the Swiss taxpayers’ association.
The SVP’s youth wing cited what it called the introduction of a third gender and “overt antisemitism” as a reason for supporting a referendum. There were large pro-Palestine protests outside the venue for the Malmö final and semi-finals in May.
Any referendums against Swiss cities hosting Eurovision would not necessarily swing in the political right’s favour, but the threat of plebiscites introduces immense uncertainty for planners.
Votes could not be held before November, but the host city for the May 2025 event is scheduled to be chosen by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation in consultation with the European Broadcasting Union by the end of August.
