Eurovision Song Contest

Austria's Eurovision winner JJ says it's "disappointing" that Israel continues to participate in the song contest.

"I would like Eurovision to be held in Vienna next year and without Israel. But the ball is in the EBU's court. We, the artists, can only raise our voices on the matter," the 24-year-old singer told Spanish daily El Pais.

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In the El Pais interview, JJ agreed there should be "greater transparency on the issue of televoting."

"This year it was all very strange", the classically trained opera singer said. He also backed comments made by last year's winner, Switzerland's Nemo, who has repeatedly called for Israel's expulsion.

"Especially, [Eurovision] needs to make changes in terms of the voting system and who participates in the festival," JJ told El Pais.

Is the EBU going to ban Spain do you think?

The national broadcasters for Spain and Belgium have complained to the competition's organisers after Israel came second and won the public vote by a landslide.

During the second semi-final of Eurovision 2025, RTVE commentators Tony Aguilar and Julia Varela discussed the need to open a debate about Israel's presence in the festival. They highlighted that the Gaza invasion by Tel Aviv has resulted in over 50,000 civilian casualties, including nearly 16,000 children. They used the introduction video of Yuval Raphael's song, the Israeli representative, to clarify the public broadcaster's stance, one of the few openly advocating for a review of the Middle Eastern country's participation in the contest.

The Israeli public broadcaster protested, and on Friday, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) threatened RTVE with "punitive fines" if any reference to the situation in Gaza is repeated. "It is essential that your commentators adhere to these rules without exception [...] to preserve Eurovision's apolitical nature and comply with the ethics and standards established in the rules. We expect full cooperation from RTVE to prevent recurrence. Any further breach may result in punitive fines according to the rules," warned a statement signed by the president of the Eurovision Reference Group, Swiss Bakel Walden, and Swedish Martin Osterdahl, the festival's executive supervisor.

Hey everyone, here's this year's version of the alternative results in which each country hands out points from zero to twenty-five.

As is tradition at this point, Germany gets a better placement. This year going up seven (!) places, sharing the record of biggest jump with France 2023. The biggest losers are Greece and the United Kingdom, dropping four places overall. Switzerland is a mixed bag, they are the new jury winner with this system and aren't last place in the televote anymore either! However being 23rd in the televote doesn't save them from dropping four places in the overall ranking as well.

Stolen from Mastodon.

Don't stop boycotting, but it may be a factor in what we saw today, at the very least it's helping the Israeli government's advertising to be more effective. ESC really needs to do something (ideally ban Israel) because Israel has made Eurovision​ even more explicitly political than it was before.

#low-effort-shitpost

HELL YEAH!

Screw you Israel! Even with your coordinated global voting you couldn't win! Austria's singer deserved it, great vocals!

Is it too late to vote for the Baby Lasagna x Käärijä mashup to win it all?

Greetings from Germany

I was curious about this and found out the team behind the postcards did an AMA on reddit.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/184455

From BBC News via this RSS feed

I was looking for an image of the CD outfit from last night, came across this mirror article and thought the comment was hilarious.