Historically it was always by jury voting, a few years back they tried just tele-polling and then realised that populations cannot be trusted, or tele-polling can perhaps be manipulated, so this year they combined the two.
This year all the focus and interest was on Russia/Ukraine.
Russia because of the recent upsurge in geopolitical tensions with the West, but then also because Moscow seems to have put lots of effort and resources into the competition to make sure it won. I think there is generally a newfound desire under Vladimir Putin’s Russia to present the country as a leader in all fields, e.g. defence/strategic plays, sport (Sochi played out well therein but not going so well after recent doping revelations and allegations) and culture.
The great thing about Eurovision is that the winner gets to host the event the following year (kind of America’s Cup but for singing) and hence Russia would have had the chance to host a glamorous, high-end ceremony next year, broadcast to hundred of millions of viewers globally (including from this year the first time in 60-odd years to the USA) and to present the country in the best light possible. Russia really, really wanted to win this competition this year and it entered a well known and established Russian pop star, Sergei Lazarev, with a top-end song, which quickly emerged as the bookies favourite, alongside the Aussie competitor – don’t ask me why Australia managed to sneak into the competition this year.
And Ukraine because its contestant, Jamala, was able to run with a highly charged political song by anyone’s books, reflecting on the forced, and brutal, deportation in World War II of her brethren ethnic Tatars by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, from now Russian controlled/annexed Crimea. The rules of the competition don’t normally allow songs with an overtly political content, so I am not quite sure how this one passed muster, and especially given ongoing tensions with Russia over Crimea. But it did, which shaped this competition up all along into a Russia versus Ukraine. This made it more like the great ice hockey games of yesteryear, the Red Machine versus the USA kind of thing.
All the voting patterns can be viewed on http://eurovisionworld.com/?eurovision=2016#russia and they are well worth flicking through.
The Russian side who were no doubt furious that Jamala’s song was permitted in the first place will also likely be fuming about some of the voting patterns, and particularly by “expert” jury’s which consistently overruled the popular vote against Russia.
Indeed, Russia will take some solace that it won the popular vote (all the investment in RT worthwhile after all), but then fell foul to expert jury’s where it ended up being placed joint fifth.
Notable herein were more than a dozen countries where their juries placed Russia more than eight places back from the popular vote, including former Eastern bloc states including Ukraine, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Macedonia and Lithuania, but also a wad of Western countries including Germany, the U.K., Italy, Ireland, Finland and Israel.
Russia also benefitted a bit herein as well with the jury in Armenia, a fellow member of the Russian Customs Union, giving the Russian contestant a 10-point higher score than the Armenian popular vote.
There always tend to be cultural bias going on in Eurovision popular voting patterns, where language and cultural affinity/closeness also shape voting patterns. This is perhaps reflected in the fact that nine of the 10 countries which gave Russia “null” points, were West European, and 9 of the 10 maximum 12 point scores for Russia came from East European states.
Russia is claiming foul play, but Moscow just needs to realize that funky voting patterns is all part and parcel of the real fun of Eurovision.
That’s why we all love it.
