« We are the winners of Eurovision »

On losing Eurovision

Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times. The first loss, in 1994, was awarded to Ovidijus Vysniauskas’ « Lopšinė mylimai » (Lullaby for my lover). The ballad about a secret love, worthy of a soundtrack to a Kevin Costner romance, received nul points and placed absolute last, disqualifying Lithuania from the next year’s contest and prophesying the three decades to come. (I count disqualification as a second loss rather than a continuation of the first loss. I also count withdrawals as losses.)

There are different ways we could count. Since 1994, Lithuania has had 24 entries, out of which:

☞ seven failed to qualify for the Eurovision final;
☞ eight placed at the bottom half of all the entries;
☞ three have placed so low that Lithuania was disqualified from competing in the next year’s contest;
☞ three have made it to the top 10!
☞ zero have been close to the podium.

Lithuania withdrew from Eurovision after the trauma of « Lopšinė mylimai » and only returned in 1999, with an entry sung entirely in Samogitian, a Western Lithuanian dialect, which then disqualified Lithuania from competing in 2000. But Lithuania has lost Eurovision not only in standard Lithuanian and Samogitian: we’ve lost in English and French, and with scattered losing lyrics in German, Russian, and American Sign Language.

It is easy to say what makes a Eurovisionwinning song. Eurovision-winning songs must have border-crossing versatility. Can you imagine it playing in a shopping mall in Slovenia? What about a gas station in Italy? That is your Eurovision-winning song. It should feel, in a good way, like listening to the radio in a foreign country, a thing you both have and have not heard before, sung with a depth of commitment and a conspicuously clear enunciation of every single word.

A good formula for losing is a much more delicate thing.

Losing Eurovision is an expensive national hobby. The costs start with the participation and broadcasting fee, which is paid by the national broadcaster and which gives that broadcaster the exclusive rights to the two semi-finals and the grand finale. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) sets different participation fees for each participating country: smaller European countries in recent years pay anywhere between €30.000 and €90.000, whereas the fee for the Big Five (The United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany and Spain) can reach €400.000. Once the broadcaster commits to the participation fee, it is up to the selected act and the national broadcaster to cover everything that will deliver a winning performance to 160 million people: costumes, stage design and props, lighting. Special effects like pyrotechnics, wind, and fog are rumored to cost around €10.000 to €20.000. Eurovision sells the most expensive wind in the world.

First hosted in 1956 as a way to create European unity through music after the Second World War, Eurovision envisioned that the best path to unity was through the diversity of European languages. From 1956 until 1964, there weren’t any official rules about the language in which the songs had to be performed, but after Sweden performed their song in English in 1965 (« Absent Friend » by Ingvar Wixell), Eurovision rules restricted participating countries to singing only in one of the national languages of the country. The rule was removed in 1973 (ABBA’s « Waterloo » was sung in Swedish at Eurovision in 1974), re-introduced in 1977, and finally abolished in 1999.

« Euro » in Eurovision does not mean that the participating country has to be a part of geographical Europe. Israel was the first non-European country to join the contest, in 1973, after which followed Turkey in 1975, Morocco in 1980 (for that year only), Cyprus in the 1981, Russia in the mid-90s, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan in the late 2000s. Australia, which has been broadcasting Eurovision since the 1970s, finally joined the contest in 2015 and has participated ever since. Any country that is a part of the EBU has a right to participate in the Eurovision. That list includes Vatican City, although the Holy See has yet to join the biggest music contest in the world. It could be a great way for the Pope to reach a new audience in urbi et orbi.

The Soviet Union was never part of Eurovision, though Yugoslavia was. Czechoslovakia was, too. East Germany wasn’t; but it was part of the Intervision Song Contest, a thing I didn’t even know existed up until two weeks ago. Intervision was Eurovision’s evil counterpart, organized by a network of Eastern European television broadcasters (the network was called Intervision), and took place only for a few bursts in the 1960s and late 1970s, with a few revivals throughout the 2000s. Intervision Song Contest’s biggest contemporary advocate seems to be Vladimir Putin, who from 2008 onwards would periodically threaten to withdraw from Eurovision Song Contest due to the « moral decay of the West ». (In 2024, Putin threatens Europe once again: this time with a resurrected Intervision. The Russian News Agency TASS states — hopes? — that seven countries will be enough. Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, and Uzbekistan have reportedly expressed interest. Why drink Coke when you can have Baikal?)

Should we see Eurovision as an essential item on the checklist of Europeanization? First EBU, then Eurovision, then membership in the European Union and/or NATO? That, at least, has been the path that most eastern European countries have taken since the early 1990s. Eurovision would seem to be the most anti-political or even utopian item on that list. It is much more charming to believe that a country could gain access to Europe through a song that speaks to the hearts of legacy Europeans, rather than spending decades on changing national laws and public infrastructure to meet European Union’s acceptance criteria. The song contest rules demand that participating countries leave « political agendas » out of Eurovision completely. Pop music, pure and unpolluted.

Of course politics creeps in — cultural politics, I mean — and those cultural politics can ricochet. In 2002, Slovenia sent Eurovision’s first all-drag band: Sestre, featuring Miss Marlena, Daphne, and Emperatrizz. They performed the sweet song « Samo ljubezen » (Only Love), about seeing the love in the lover’s eyes. It caused a homophobic public uproar in Slovenia, which in turn elicited official concern from members of the European Parliament and complicated Slovenia’s bid for EU membership. ¹(Slovenia was set to hold a referendum for accession to the European Union in 2003.) Lithuania, meanwhile, which finally joined the European Union in 2004, brought a same-sex kiss to the Eurovision stage in 2015, in a bubble gum pop duet about falling in love, even though same-sex marriage is still not recognized in Lithuania. And performers have tried their luck with more straightforwardly « political »  messages — as in the Ukrainian entry from 2007, in which Verka Serduchka singing « Lasha Tumbai » sounded a lot like « Russia Goodbye ».

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As the number of participating countries grew, Eurovision rules had to change. The most dramatic change happened in 1993. In the wake of the falls of Yugoslavia, the USSR and Czechoslovakia, the number of participating countries was projected to double. Fourteen ex-communist countries became members of the EBU, which meant they could participate in Eurovision, the sudden expansion was presenting a challenge to the organizers: too many contestants would burst the seams of good, tight television timing. And so, in 1993, Slovenia’s national broadcaster RTVSLO, together with EBU, hosted a pre-selection song contest in Ljubljana, in which countries competed for the chance to compete in the real Eurovision, held that year in Millstreet, Ireland. Kvalifikacija za Millstreet, it was called: Qualification for Millstreet. It was Eurovision’s weird, one-off solution to the problem of its own expansion. ²Fourteen countries from the East applied to the Kvalifikacija. Seven of them dropped out (Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine); the remaining seven (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Estonia, Romania and Hungary) competed for three spots. Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia made the cut, and then lost at Eurovision like any other EBU member. Lithuania, being one of the countries that dropped out, thus lost the chance to lose at Eurovision.

I never knew a time in which Lithuania was not participating in, and therefore losing, the Eurovision Song Contest. The first contest in my memory was the 2004 Eurovision, which was won by Ukraine’s entry: « Wild Dances » by Ruslana. The Lithuanian entry, « What Happened to Your Love », by Linas and Simona, was performed right after « Wild Dances » in the semi-final and failed to qualify to the grand finale. I remember the disappointment, a feeling with which I would learn to make peace. And no, deciding to stop caring about Eurovision was not an option. I didn’t know it then, but that May, Eurovision became my Super Bowl, my Olympics, my Olympus. It could have only been fate when, fourteen years later, when I took my national English language exam, my examiner was one of the Lithuania representatives from Eurovision 2007. I wasn’t starstruck so much as perplexed — a person who’d performed in Eurovision just wasn’t supposed to exist in such a casual and everyday situation. As I couldn’t stop associating her with Eurovision, I wondered how often she thinks about Eurovision. When I saw her face, I forgot the English language, and was immediately transported back to the sofa in 2007, to the disappointment of yet another loss.

The worst and surest formula for losing Eurovision — or maybe the cheapest one? — is to write a song about winning Eurovision. In 2006, Lithuania’s song was « We Are the Winners ». It’s dominated by its a chanting chorus « we are the winners of Eurovision / we are, we are / you gotta vote, vote, vote, vote, vote for the winners ». Today we’d call this manifesting. The group was LT United, formed solely for the sake of competing in the 2006 Eurovision, when one Lithuanian chart-topping musician, Andrius Mamontovas, called five other Lithuanian chart-toppers with a pitch. If Greece could win Eurovision with « My Number One », maybe Lithuania could manifest their way to victory, too.

« We Are The Winners » starts off with the six men standing by their microphones and the audience already booing. After the first verse of the victorious chanting, French ad libs are added to the chant: « de Vilnius city a Paris, LT United ici » (« from Vilnius city to Paris, LT United here. ») The second verse of victorious chanting is screamed into a megaphone, after which the very serious-looking bald man in the group starts dancing chaotically while another plays electric violin. Then another verse of chanting and everyone screams « vote! » at the end. The audience, now divided, both cheers and boos.

2006, as it happens, was an important year in the history of Eurovision booing, which does not happen very often (and which will become, as we’ll see, an existential Eurovision problem). Iceland — incidentally, the rare country that has lost the Eurovision Song Contest more than Lithuania has — was also booed, and for another meta-exercise in Eurovision commentary. The song was « Congratulations », by Silvia Night, and it played on her persona: conceited, self-centered, a performative arrogance directed, in this case, explicitly at Eurovision itself. « Eurovision nation, your dream’s coming true / You’ve been waiting forever for me to save you, » she sang. « Born in Reykjavik in a different league, no damn Eurotrash freak / The vote is in, I’ll fucking win. » Silvia Night did not fucking win, placing thirteenth in the semi-final. Her live performance was booed; she claimed not to have heard the boos, and accused the producers of artificially adding them. Nor did « We Are the Winners » win Eurovision (though it placed sixth and remains the highest-ranking Lithuanian entry). So far, no song about Eurovision has ever won Eurovision.The Finnish heavy metal band Lordi won that year, with « Hard Rock Hallelujah ». They were also booed, though for reasons not really clear to me. « Hard Rock Hallelujah » was an unusual entry for Eurovision compared to the previous track record of winning songs being traditional pop. Dressed head to toe in truly disturbing monster costumes, Lordi praises the genre of heavy metal (hard rock) and how listening to hard rock can be a transcendental experience (hallelujah). Their victory brought Lithuania an ironic consolation prize, when Lordi’s five monsters entered the winner’s press conference, and started singing our song: « We are the winners of Eurovision. » The irrepressible Silvia Night modeled a good formula for bad losing: she called the audience a bunch of « ungrateful bastards who vote for some ugly people from Finland who don’t have make-up artists ».

Only once since 1999 has there been any open Lithuanian doubt about participating in Eurovision. In 2010, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, Lietuvos Radijas ir Televizija (LRT, Lithuania’s national broadcaster, and the only Lithuanian broadcaster licensed to participate in Eurovision) almost withdrew from Eurovision due to insufficient funding. But right before the EBU’s confirmation deadline, a since-dissolved Lithuanian telecommunications company called TEO LT stepped in and covered part of the participation fee (the actual amount has not been disclosed). TEO LT’s CEO cited two reasons: to improve the Lithuanian image abroad and to strengthen the digital expansion of telecommunications offering for Lithuanian audiences. The head of LRT, Audrius Siaurusevičius, couched his best wishes to whichever act was destined to represent us in a curse of caution: « Given the current economic situation, God forbid Lithuania wins Eurovision this year. »

The destined act was the ska-funk band InCulto, which lost Eurovision with « Eastern European Funk », a song about dancing to the funk despite the historic and social misfortunes through which Eastern Europeans had lived. Its lyrics nodded to twentieth-century wars and Soviet occupation:

It’s an unapologetic start to a song from, and about, history’s losers. For the full three minutes (the time limit of all Eurovision songs), the audience will have no place to hide from the funkified trauma of Eastern European history. Perseverance gets an erotic tinge: « We’ve had it pretty tough / But that’s ok we like it rough ».³

The song also spoke to a migratory present. In 2010, Lithuania experienced the biggest wave of (mostly) blue-collar out-migration since 1990 — to Western and Northern Europe: mostly to Norway, the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands. The first semi-final of Eurovision 2010 (in Oslo that year) opened with InCulto boldly pouring salt in the wounds of intra-« European » perception:

A modern European migration narrative? The maroon-colored passport did not quite grant to its new bearers the warm feeling of equality or unity that all had hoped for.

« Eastern European Funk » lost Eurovision, but I count it as a noble loss, even a triumphant one, registering the grievances of second-class citizenship. There’s a Lithuanian idiom, nusimaus paskutinius triusikus, which means « to take off one’s last pair of underwear ». It refers to extreme measures or last resorts. InCulto’s performance finishes with all of the band members taking off their pants and dancing in glittery purple boxers. The song got eight points from Georgia, seven from the United Kingdom, five from Norway, and four from Sweden — all (except Georgia) places with a significant Lithuanian migrant population. Ireland awarded « Eastern European Funk » douze points (twelve points), the highest a country can receive. Ireland, as it happens, was one of the top destinations for Lithuanian migrants, and it is likely that those twelve points were the expression of a Lithuanian diaspora.

Is Eurovision the most democratic way to interact with pop music? Since this is not an easy question, the answer must be no. But it’s still tempting to imagine Eurovision as being something like a polity, in which the people, more-orless democratically, express themselves. And yet Eurovision performances are also intensely regulated, in both production and consumption. Every participating country gets three minutes in which to perform their song. Six people on the stage, maximum. A song’s main vocals and melody must be performed live; backing vocals and the instruments can be pre-recorded.

Those performances are then subjected to something like a democratic process. Nowadays, viewers vote, but there’s also a jury, and the performance that gets the most votes from both the viewers and the jury wins the contest.

Originally, when the Contest began back in 1956, the voting was done through a jury, which consisted of ordinary people who simply voted for their favorite songs. The producers of the Eurovision Song Contest would telephone the jury to get their picks and then announce the accumulated points in the studio. The jury was never shown (except for a brief window from 1971 until 1973). 1997 was the first year of direct audience voting, through the modern democratic miracle of televoting. ⁴After each performance, the public had five minutes to cast their votes via telephone, the results of which were then announced by the country’s spokesperson in the broadcast.

Then came a different kind of jury, the professional jury that started to creep into Eurovision in the late 2000s. Starting in 2009, Eurovision’s winner was selected by combining the jury and the public votes. Each country has its own jury, consisting of five industry professionals (singers, producers, songwriters, DJs) and they’re meant to judge each entry based on its vocal capabilities of the act, composition of the song, performance on the stage, and their overall impressions of the performance. The juries and the public have a fifty-fifty split of the total results of the Eurovision.

It’s great, or at least harmonious, when the jury and the public agree, as happened every year from 2009 until 2014. From 2015 up until last year’s Eurovision (with the exception of 2017), though, the jury’s and the public’s winners have been different. In the years where the jury and the public crown different winners of the Eurovision, the jury winner prevails. In 2023, for instance: the jury winner was Sweden, represented by Loreen, performing with « Tattoo » (Loreen won Eurovision in 2012, too). The public winner was Finland’s Käärijä, with « Cha Cha Cha ». Finland came in fifth with the jury vote, and Sweden was second in the public vote, making Sweden the winner of 2023 Eurovision.

An anti-democratic solution to the problem of a tasteless public? That’s one way to look at it: the assumption that the average European viewer, unable to distinguish real art, needs mediation from the professionals. (The public vote remains powerful for the music market, at least: tickets, streaming numbers, merchandise.) Another way to look at the expanded presence of the jury is the need for tension and suspense in the televised event. It used to be that different national spokespeople would announce the combined jury and public votes. The voting sequence, albeit long, was exciting — or at least it was exciting for the first five countries. The suspense would fizzle out after half of the countries had announced their votes and the favorite was clear. Eurovision would be pretty much over by then to audiences at home.

So we have the chaos and the stress of the voting sequence (great televised entertainment!) — but at what cost? When I think of the jury during Eurovision voting sequences, I always imagine five faceless people who are watching Eurovision in a dark room, taking serious notes for two hours straight. Even if the full list of all juries is revealed a few hours after the Eurovision ends, public voting somehow feels more transparent: public voters are the people sitting right next to you, watching Eurovision, or the friends you’re texting, the friends who are, like you, deciding which performances are best for bathroom breaks.

The jury system marks Eurovision’s evolution into a truly and perhaps dismally European structure, where bureaucracy and rules shape the way one’s vote is counted. To enjoy Eurovision is also to understand that it is less the most democratic way to interact with pop music than it is the most bureaucratic way to interact with pop music. It is designed to discipline the participating act and the broadcaster and the viewer, all while sustaining the fantasy — a beautiful fantasy! — of a purer democracy.

The split between the jury and the public vote changes the way countries lose Eurovision, too: the manner of loss, and the meaning of it. The sting has been multiplied. Losing Eurovision in the early 2000s was simple: your song just wasn’t the best song (or there was another song that just stole the show for more people). It was reminiscent of a small town meeting, where deliberation takes place and the winner is crowned among the community. Today, though, making sense of losing Eurovision requires making peace with a rather opaque system. Maybe millions in the audience did want your song to be the winner, but if two hundred or so people (the members of the jury) didn’t see you as the winner, well: tough luck.

Desperate times, desperate measures. I must not forget an important detail about public voting in Eurovision: one phone number can vote up to ten times. And of course you can’t vote for your own country (with a Lithuanian phone number, that is, I can’t vote for Lithuania). So as a member of the Lithuanian diaspora, I perform the patriotic duty that my position allows me to perform, in other words I commit Eurovision voting fraud. I resort to buying a couple of burner SIM cards. So do my Lithuanian friends living in Amsterdam or London. Countries with big Lithuanian diasporas thus bring the big points (huit, dix, douze) home. Is it really fraud? Maybe. But it’s the Eurovision voting system that, paradoxically, makes it possible to justify this fraud as patriotic, for we are a democratic counterbalance. Some fraud is virtuous.⁵

Or is Eurovision something else? Not a miniature polity we might want to be more or less democratic, but rather something more utopian. Its founding aspiration, after all, was to be a musical alternative to war and violent conflict that would consign those evils to history’s uncatchy dustbin.

Eurovision is best understood as a « moral equivalent of war ». The American philosopher William James coined that phrase in a lecture in 1906, an interesting document in the history of pacifism. As a remedy to the militarism he felt creeping all around him, James proposed a system of civic conscription. It was an optimistic solution to a pessimistic predicament: James saw war was an intractable and inevitable human impulse, and he admitted that war did stir certain virtues. Those « martial virtues » would be necessary « in the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting »: « intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built. » Hence his proposal, which he himself called « utopian ». A moral equivalent of war would mobilize society, cultivate and preserve these virtues, while averting modern warfare’s vastly expanded horrors:

If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life.

I like to think that William James would have liked Eurovision. Eurovision entails the competitive passion, a quasi-militaristic sense of national pride. Eurovision has grown into a massive conscription effort, with extensive pre-selection rounds, large-scale mobilization of resources, strategic campaigns as different acts participate in the countless Eurovision pre-parties to find their voter base before the competition itself. The contest itself sets international alliances in motion, and activates diasporic fifth columns. And what does victory bring? The winner gets to reclaim not only the title of the winner for the year, but also to host the battleground for the next year’s competition. Victory means airplay, and the honor of hosting the next one. Thus will Eurovision endure.

It is hard to imagine a nation which is more conscripted to Eurovision than Lithuania. When the Lithuanian darlings The Roop were chosen for Eurovision 2020, Lithuania quickly rose to the top of European betting market odds. It appeared that this three-man band, plus two back-up dancers who only popped up during the chorus, with their song about ambitions not being defined by one’s age, might finally bring the Eurovision trophy to Lithuania. Lithuanian newspapers interviewed the mayors of Vilnius and Kaunas: are their cities ready to host the next Eurovision? How many people can the biggest concert venues fit? What about the sound issues in Vilnius Siemens arena? Can they be fixed in time? Eurovision 2020 was postponed one year, due to the pandemic (I have not counted postponement as a loss); in 2021, The Roop placed eighth. It was the second best Eurovision placement result for Lithuania.

Eurovision remains the most watched television show — event? — of the year, consistently attracting around eighty percent of the Lithuanian audience. In 2021, PornHub reported a 22 percent drop in site visits from Lithuanian users during the Eurovision grand finale.

Among the things that James’s essay does not consider is what it means to lose the moral equivalent of war. But as somebody from the country of continuous losses, this question is of concern to me. It is worth returning to the phenomenon of booing here. Even devoted Eurovision fans do not agree on the etiquette for booing at Eurovision; perhaps because it is Eurovision’s most direct act of war. Eurovision involves strategic alliances and cunning maneuvers, to be sure, but there’s no negative voting in Eurovision: if you, as a viewer, dislike an entry, you can only vote for your favorites and hope that no one else will vote for your least favorite entry. Booing is only reserved for the crème de la crème of the performances in the Eurovision, which leads me to admit that the booing that greeted « We are the Winners » in the 2006 Eurovision was entirely appropriate — nay, earned. The audience approached the performance in good faith, and with complete sincerity. « We Are the Winners? » No, that’s not how you win. The booing, in hindsight, was good booing: it sustained the utopian project that is Eurovision.

And that utopia is a fragile thing! James’s essay becomes more poignant when we read it from the hindsight of the cataclysms he anticipated. The other kind of booing with which Eurovision must grapple is when a country rather than an act is booed. Let us call this political booing, or perhaps external booing: an intrusion from the real world of geopolitics (or immoral war) into the bubble of utopian pop.

This sort of booing, perhaps surprisingly, has only become a problem for Eurovision organizers in the past ten years. In 2014, the Russian entry was booed — the Tolmachevy Sisters, seventeen-year-old twins — because Russia had annexed Crimea in February. Eurovision took place in May. The next year, Eurovision’s organizers announced that they would deploy « anti-booing technology ». Anti-booing technology meant that viewers at home would hear pre-recorded audience cheers instead of the boos. Anti-booing technology was also installed into the performer’s earpieces, so the performer in the arena couldn’t hear any booing before or after their performance. As a solution to the problem of booing, it has the smack of desperation: real boos suppressed by fake news. But it is not surprising that Eurovision would respond this way. The anti-political illusion of European co-existence must be preserved. For a fragile illusion this silence is golden.⁶

I am terrified of Lithuania winning Eurovision one day. Every February, when the new act gets chosen, I breathe a small sigh of relief that this will not be the year.

I look to the less utopian issues, the less pop-musical matters, for comfort. Like how, in 2017, the European Commission published a set of guidelines on dual quality of same brand food products. Several Eastern European countries conducted research comparing the ingredients in food items sold both in Eastern and Western Europe. The findings showed that there was less fish in the Eastern European fish sticks, less nuts in Eastern Nutella, and more artificial sweeteners in drinks. Food manufacturers argued that the decision to put less of everything into the food made for Eastern European consumption was in fact deliberate: to tailor to food preferences and tastes of the region. I do not know how a country which has less fish in their European fish sticks can win Eurovision. This is a comfort.

Losing the moral equivalent of war feels good. When Lithuania is losing Eurovision, it means that it upholds the institution. And our higher ranked losses have brought meaningful consolation prizes. « We Are The Winners » — bold enough to make fun of the structure into which we’re trying so desperately to fit — did take off as a Eurovision deep-cut, adored by those who care about Eurovision the most. Hearing non-Lithuanian fans talking about how beautiful the Lithuanian language sounds was the equivalent of figuring out that Nutella on my kitchen shelf is the same as the one sold in Italy or Slovenia. Lithuania has perfected the recipe for losing and it’s exactly the same as any in any European country which is continuously losing.

I am certain that winning would feel absolutely euphoric — coming in first place after competing for so long would taste so sweet. Every year, as any loyal member of the Lithuanian diaspora, I still buy an array of SIM cards. Like any proud mother, I take photos of my television screen when it displays Lithuania in first place in the standings (even if it is only for a few split seconds of the evening). Rational me perfectly understands the rules of the Eurovision game and what it would take to deliver the winning performance, and — more importantly — that winning will have no actual implications that will be felt by anyone, except maybe the performers. This has never stopped the devilish creature in the back of my mind from reminding me every year that Eurovision will always be the definitive proof of where we are as a country and how we compare to others; how many rungs are separating us from being the best at least once. Once again, you will find me at this slot machine in the second week in May.

1. Dutch MEP Lousewies van der Laan said that « The current controversy on the song contest entry, of all things, doesn’t exactly promote the image of Slovenia in Europe. » See Martin Banks, « Transvestite Eurosong win sparks Slove nia accession doubts », Politico, 6 March 2002. ↩︎
2. Starting in 1994, Eurovision relied on relegation rules to manage the number of the participating countries. Rele gation rules disqualified the worst performing countries from performing in the next year’s Eurovision, allowing other countries to take their place. In the early 2000s, Eurovision would introduce semi-finals, so as to allow each participating country to perform on the Eurovision stage at least once. First one, and now two, semi-finals have turned the Eurovision Song Contest from a single Saturday’s broadcast into an epic series of three broad casts, spanning a full week. ↩︎
3. A hypersexualization of Eastern European identity in Eurovision has occurred a few times. In 2014, Poland’s performance « My Slowianie » (We Are Slavic) featured performers in traditional dresses, with deep cleavage, washing clothes and suggestively churning butter. ↩︎
4. There are always exceptions. Some of the smaller participating countries, like San Marino, do not have their own telephone lines. San Marino uses Italian phone networks. Back in 2016, the EBU proposed to San Marino that it count aggregated averages from an undisclosed group of voting countries as its public vote results. San Marino refused to rely on other countries’ votes, and since then San Marino is the only participating country in the Eurovision whose results in Eurovision are decided by only their own jury. ↩︎
5. Of course I vote for Lithuania in Eurovision out of my own good will and pocket. In 2013, Lithuanian media reported on Eurovision voting fraud in a more traditional sense. News outlets released a video of Russian-speaking men meeting up with groups of students and offering them €20 each if they voted for Azerbaijan as many times as they could. Allegedly, every voting group was handed SIM cards and had a supervisor make sure that the recruited voters were actually voting. That year the Lithuanian public gave their twelve points to Azerbaijan and the performance came in second place overall. ↩︎
6. Booing notwithstanding, high placement has not been problem for Russia. Russia’s lowest placement since 2014 was seventh place. Russian acts have received high points from both the public and the jury, the high public votes coming mostly from other ex-Soviet countries. ↩︎