Two and a half months before Montenegrins were due to vote in a referendum on independence from Serbia that would bring the union of the last two Yugoslav republics to an end, Montenegrin and Serbian television viewers in March 2006 had a different kind of vote to cast: choosing what might be Serbia–Montenegro’s last entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.
The outcome of the national selection at the Sava Centar in Belgrade – with the Montenegrin delegation outraged that spectators had jeered and thrown bottles at the winning Montenegrin band, the Belgrade audience and the Serbian press accusing the Montenegrin jurors of ganging up to make sure a song from Montenegro won, and Serbia–Montenegro ultimately unable to send a song to Eurovision that year at all – seemed to symbolise a breakdown in relations that would have to make separation inevitable: if Serbia and Montenegro couldn’t co-operate on picking a song for Eurovision, how could they be expected to co-operate on anything else?
If Evropesma 2006 hadn’t happened, one or other of the smart young post-Yugoslav directors on the mid-2000s film-festival circuit would have had to make it up: a portmanteau of political contradictions and historical legacies crashing into each other in a setting tailor-made for pop-culture nostalgia, with cameos from a world-weary Sarajevan and a sex symbol from Split, all circling round a competition where the question of who got to take credit for the Eurovision entries of a disintegrating state had rumbled on ever since the Yugoslav federation fell apart.
Yugoslavia had been telling stories about its place in the world through Eurovision since 1961, when joining in the annual contest as the only state socialist country ever to take part helped to symbolise the proud geopolitical position ‘between east and west’ – unattached either to Soviet communism or American capitalism – that Tito’s Yugoslavia claimed as the host, later that year, of the First Non-Aligned Conference in Belgrade.
Out of the string of songs that TV Zagreb guided through Yugoslavia’s inter-republic Eurovision selection festival, Jugovizija, in an unbroken streak between 1986 and 1990, the most successful had been the jaunty slice of zabavna (light-entertainment) music called ‘Rock me baby,’ with which the Zadar band Riva narrowly won Eurovision in 1989 – entitling Yugoslavia to host Eurovision 1990.
By May 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen, most of the 22 Eurovision contestants that year had come equipped with something about freedom, walls or Europe in their lyrics, and moving the symbolic centre of Europe for an evening to a state socialist country adapting to multi-party democracy told an even more powerful story about ‘Europe’ than viewers in 1989 would have anticipated there would be.
Within Yugoslavia, of course, 1989–90 had been a time of increasing political tensions between republics, spurred on by Slobodan Milošević’s populist agitation about the ‘minority’ position of Serbs in the federation, the anti-democratic steps he took to build his personal power on the federal presidency, his suppression of Albanians’ civil rights in Kosovo, and the reactions this climate provoked in Slovenia and Croatia.
Rivalries between TV Zagreb and the umbrella federal broadcaster Yugoslav Radio-Television (JRT) dogged the organisation of the contest, and the TV Zagreb that hosted Eurovision in May 1990 was very soon to become Croatian Television (HTV), a state broadcaster with a declared nation-building mission – to reshape Croatian public consciousness around the public’s sense of themselves as Croats, away from affinity with Yugoslavia or even memory that Croats and Serbs had once sought a political future together.
Indeed, Croatia’s first multi-party elections – which voted the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) into power on a ticket of freedom, independence and closeness to Europe but alarmed Serbs who saw in HDZ a disturbing ambivalence towards the legacy of the 1941–5 Independent State of Croatia and its genocidal persecution of Serbs – had their second and last round the day after Eurovision 1990.
‘Rock me baby’, as Croatian viewers are annually reminded, is the star turn in Croatia’s national history of Eurovision – a victory in the name of Yugoslavia but, along the contours of post-Yugoslav Croatian cultural identity, unambiguously made in Croatia.
It was also, of course, a Yugoslav victory – something which in the cultural politics of ‘brotherhood and unity’ belonged to the whole country, regardless of the republic that had produced it. Milošević, unlike the 1990s Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, did not sever Serbian cultural identity from ‘Yugoslav’ culture even as he gave orders in wars that would destroy the Yugoslav idea in practice. On Serbian television, Riva’s Eurovision win in 1989 is just as much ‘ours’ as it is in Croatia.
After Eurovision 1990, when Croatian teen idol Tajči performed another standard of late Yugoslav zabavna music, the fifties-retro ‘Hajde da ludujemo’ (‘Let’s go crazy’) – not at all to be confused with newly-composed folk music star Lepa Brena’s 1987–9 musical trilogy Hajde da se volimo (Let’s fall in love) – no Croatian participant would even come close to representing Yugoslavia.
The state of relations between Tuđman’s Croatia and the federal institutions Milošević successfully dominated was such, by March 1991, that none of the Croatian singers who travelled to Sarajevo for the last ‘Jugovizija’ to involve all six republics are likely to have believed they had a serious chance of winning – least of all Tedi Spalato, who chose to perform his song ‘Gospode moj’ (‘O, my lord’), one of many overtly Catholic songs now allowed to be shown on HTV, dressed as a friar.
TV Belgrade’s entry, to nobody’s surprise, won the next Jugovizija in 1991, with Milošević exerting enough control over institutions in Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro to pressure their JRT ‘studios’ to vote the same way as Belgrade. TV Belgrade and TV Priština gave no points to Spalato the leading Croatian contender, Danijel Popović – a Montenegrin born in Podgorica who would relaunch his pop career then in 2005 – whose song followed in Tajči’s retro footsteps with the Americanising title of ‘Daj, obuci levisice’ (‘Come on, put your Levis on’).
The winner, Bebi Dol with ‘Brazil’, reached 68 points on the basis of votes from the Belgrade, Priština, Novi Sad and Montenegro studios – and nowhere else.
One last Jugovizija, with entries from the Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Priština, Belgrade and Montenegro studios but no Slovenian, Croatian or Macedonian participation, took place on 28 March 1992 – the same day that the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, would withdraw his assent to the Lisbon Agreement and its suggested division of Bosnia-Herzegovina. TV Belgrade’s Extra Nena performed at Eurovision 1992 in Malmö a few weeks before United Nations sanctions against the Milošević regime came into force and prevented what had become the ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ (FRY) – that is, Serbia and Montenegro – from competing in Eurovision for the rest of the 1990s.
Taking part in Eurovision became a possibility again after Milošević fell from power in October 2000. A year after FRY converted into a looser State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, meeting the pro-independence ambitions of the Montenegrin prime minister Milo Đukanović halfway, the Association of Public Broadcasters of Serbia and Montenegro (UJRT) returned to Eurovision in 2004 in almost as dramatic a way as possible: by selecting an expertly assembled repackaging of musical and cultural traditions, Željko Joksimović’s ‘Lane moje’ (‘My faun’) that came second, behind Ukraine’s Ruslana, and set the format for many of the Yugoslav region’s most successful Eurovision songs over the next decade, often written by Joksimović himself.
Joksimović’s performance, as Serbian anthropologists including Vesna Mikić and Marijana Mitrović have written, aimed to communicate a gentle, non-threatening image of Serbian masculinity a world away from the pictures of gangsters, paramilitaries and war-criminal leaders that had dominated Western perceptions of Serbia since the Yugoslav wars. Hitting all the buttons of the mode of ‘consenting self-exoticisation’ that had spread from the ‘world music’ circuit to Eurovision by 2004, Joksimović performed a knowing familiarity with the exoticising gaze of Western viewers that aimed to reposition himself and the nation as paradoxically modern, able to step away from tradition at the same time as playing with it.
Joksimović had got to Eurovision through a sixteen-song final in Belgrade, Evropesma, with eight songs from Serbia and eight from Montenegro. Four of the Serbian songs had themselves come through the 28-song Beovizija festival, held the night before – perhaps as a way to include popular pop-folk acts in the spectacle with minimal risk of one actually going to Eurovision (even pop-folk superstar Jelena Karleuša, in her only attempt to take part in Eurovision so far, had only scraped an undistinguished 13 points).
Montenegrin viewers who complained that the Serbian jurors and audience hadn’t voted for any of the Montenegrin songs in Evropesma 2004 – quite likely because Montenegrin television hadn’t booked any singers with an established audience outside Montenegro – had much more to celebrate a year later, when ‘Zauvijek moja’ (‘Forever mine’) by the new Montenegrin boyband No Name won Evropesma 2005.
‘Zauvijek moja’ was the Joksimović formula applied to Montenegro’s striking landscapes and old coastal towns, with lyrics doing the typical geographical move of many post/Yugoslav patriotic songs by knitting a diverse landscape of shorelines, rivers and mountains into one national whole – representing both countries, but quite clearly coded with its use of the ijekavian language variant (rather then Serbia’s ekavian) and its emphasis on hills, not to mention its video, as Montenegro.
Serbia–Montenegro at Eurovision could have carried on, formally or informally, in this post-Yugoslav version of an ‘ethnic key’ for some time (responsibility for Belgium’s Eurovision entries, after all, rotates between the French- and Flemish-speaking broadcasters every year).
Instead, Evropesma 2006, at the Sava Centar in Belgrade, proved to be the last joint selection in which the two republics would ever take part – and one of the last media events to involve both republics before Montenegrins voted for independence in a referendum which, it was declared on 2 March 2006, was going to take place only a day after the 2006 Eurovision final.
Evropesma 2006, as in 2005, combined the top-scoring songs from separate festivals in Serbia and Montenegro (Beovizija and Montevizija) into one final contest in Belgrade. Montenegrin grievances before Evropesma in 2005, when Serbian television had apparently promoted its own songs (including a Joksimović-written entry for Jelena Tomašević) more heavily than Montenegro’s, had been somewhat alleviated by No Name’s result, though the surprisingly few points Serbian jurors gave No Name and the no points at all that Montenegrin jurors gave Tomašević suggested that their relations at Evropesma were beginning to echo the increasing political separation of the republics.
If you could have tracked Yugoslavia’s disintegration in 1989–92 through the process of its Eurovision song selection breaking down, was the same about to happen for Serbia and Montenegro?
Radio-Television Serbia (RTS) arrived at Evropesma with a slate of big names and productions including Ana Nikolić – whose pan-Balkan ‘Romale romali’, rumour held later, was supposedly going to be re-recorded in English by none other than Kylie Minogue – Ivana Jordan’s etno-trance ‘Lazarica’, and Tijana Dapčević’s tightly-choreographed ‘Greh’, which stopped short in its fifteen-second instrumental break for the Macedonian-born, Belgrade-based singer (whose married surname came from her Montenegrin husband) to mime playing the cello live on stage.
Beovizija runners-up Flamingosi, joined by the etno-jazz singer Ljubiša Stojanović Louis, had only been formed the previous year but gathered more and more momentum before Evropesma as TV and radio replayed their comic take on twenties dance crazes, ‘Ludi letnji ples’ (‘Crazy summer dance’). The duo of TV presenter Ognjen Amidžić, born in Šabac, and actor Marinko Madžgalj, who had been born in Belgrade but grew up in Kotor, Montenegro crammed the names of seventeen European capital cities into what the beginning of the song already announced as ‘the winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2006’.
Ironically, in light of the result, ‘Ludi letnji ples’ would have been more representative of the Serbia–Montenegro state union than almost any other entry from Serbia – with Amidžić singing in the ekavian language variant and Madžgalj singing in his own ijekavian, a small linguistic detail with big symbolic weight. (Montenegrin, like Croatian, uses the ijekavian variant as standard – and the two versions of the vowel mark language as ‘in Serbian’ or ‘not in Serbian’ in much post-Yugoslav language politics today.)
Radio-Television Montenegro (RTCG), for its part, brought the winner of Montevizija, Stevan Faddy’s ‘Cipele’ – an uptempo ballad in the style of Danijel Popović, the Montenegrin singer who had performed another of TV Zagreb’s classic Eurovision entries in the eighties – and the top half of the Montevizija scoreboard. Serbian viewers would have recognised few of the acts except No Name, seeking a second consecutive Eurovision performance.
Their song ‘Moja ljubavi’, with traditional zurla pipes mixed into the soundtrack, involved essentially the same drums and harmonies as ‘Zauvijek moja’, set itself between the sea and mountains, and addressed a ‘you’ who might as well have been a woman or the nation.
The confrontation between Evropesma’s live audience and the Montenegrin jurors – who were uniformly choosing not to vote either for Flamingosi or Ana Nikolić – did not just bring back to mind the gradual collapse of Jugovizija and Yugoslavia because of how it juxtaposed Serbian perceptions of Montenegrin obstructionism with the determination of Montenegro’s political leadership to obtain independence: it also took place in the presence of two Croatian and Bosnian pop stars with widespread appeal across the post-Yugoslav region who had been invited to perform in the Evropesma interval, each of whom brought their own associations with the cultural politics of wider Yugoslavia.
Hari Mata Hari, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s contestant in 2006, was set to win Bosnia’s best ever Eurovision result – third place – with his song ‘Lejla’, co-written by Joksimović in what was now the recognisable Eurovision genre of the ‘Balkan ethnic ballad’.
Bosnian TV’s invitation to Joksimović had been controversial among Bosniak nationalists who believed that inviting a Serbian composer to write the Bosnian entry was unfair to Bosnian songwriters and an insult to the memory of victims of war crimes committed by Serbs.
The cooperation between Hari Mata Hari and Joksimović, however, was characteristic of the tentative re-establishment of connections between Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian music industries that had started to take place at the end of the 1990s and was becoming, if not yet routine, at least a regular practice by 2006.
While Bosnian–Croatian collaborations were the least politically sensitive and most common, the most sensitive material and symbolic boundary in post-Yugoslav cultural politics during the mid-2000s was between Croatia and Serbia – and this was the line that Evropesma’s other special guest, the Croatian star Severina, had crossed in choosing to collaborate for her Eurovision entry with the Sarajevo-born, Belgrade-based composer Goran Bregović.
The elements of folk song, dance and costume from the Dalmatian hinterland that Severina had incorporated into her own example of Eurovision ethnopop, ‘Moja štikla’ (‘My stiletto’) – written for her by Croatia’s Eurovision representative in 2005, Boris Novković – had been the subject of a moral panic in Croatia for weeks before it had even won Croatia’s own marathon Eurovision selection, ‘Dora’. When Croatian national identity was supposed to depend on the nation being European and not Balkan – therefore not Serbian, Yugoslav, or ‘eastern’-sounding either – the Dinaric chants and gusle lines of ‘Moja štikla’ sounded far too much like what many Croats thought of as Serbian ‘turbofolk’ to represent Croatia in a competition with a hundred million Europeans looking on.
Insisting that the song’s component parts were authentically Croatian, as Severina and her team went through all sorts of strategies to do, just reminded people of the uncomfortable truth that traditions understood as ‘Balkan’ were inseparably part of Croatia’s own cultural identity. Traditionalists objected to Severina’s racy past – in 2004 she had been one of the first celebrities from any country to have a sex tape leaked on to the internet – and the song’s interjections of ‘s-s-s-sex’.
In short, Severina had tapped into almost every cultural anxiety in mid-2000s Croatia even before it was confirmed that the song had been composed by Goran Bregović – the Sarajevo rocker turned world music entrepreneur who the Croatian press could easily describe as Serbian himself after his choice to live between Paris and Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, and who was famous for incorporating Serbian folk music and – often uncredited – Romani music into his songs.
Bregović’s old band, Bijelo dugme, had reunited in 2005 for three large concerts in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb, the first time corporate sponsors – especially in Croatia – had stood behind the nostalgia for Yugoslav popular culture that had sustained some remnant of a pan-Yugoslav cultural space despite the violence with which inter-ethnic coexistence in the region had been torn apart.
Evropesma 2006, with Yugoslavia’s last two republics pulling away from each other and the memory of a larger Yugoslavia haunting the Sava Centar in the shape of two Croatian and Bosnian stars with their own complex relationships to whatever ‘Yugoslavia’ might mean fifteen years after the Yugoslav wars began, would have unfolded in the shadow of the ‘former state’ even without the news that began to filter through to the Serbian public that Saturday afternoon: that Slobodan Milošević had been found dead in The Hague.
Milošević’s death in custody at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), cutting short his trial and the longest case the ICTY’s prosecutors had ever worked, came only a week after the first president of the Republic of Serb Krajina (RSK), Milan Babić, had also been found dead in the ICTY detention unit. Babić had been convicted of crimes against humanity for his part in the RSK’s occupation of Croatian territory and displacement of Croats from the area that Milošević had planned to annex into Serbia; serving his sentence in an undisclosed location, he had returned briefly to the ICTY to testify against Milan Martić, the second president of the RSK.
Babić had committed suicide, while Milošević suffered from a chronic heart condition that had already delayed his trial on several occasions; Serbs who found conspiracy theories persuasive still suspected the deaths had not been accidents. Even if only unconsciously, the script of ‘conspiracies against Serbs’ would have been in at least some audience members’ minds as the Evropesma voting ritual broke down.
The Sava Centar audience began booing Montenegro’s first juror, music producer Predrag Kalezić, as soon as he awarded his top two sets of points, 10 and 12, to the top two Montenegrin favourites ‘Cipele’ and ‘Moja ljubavi’ – the same pattern as the Montenegrin votes in Evropesma 2005. The second Montenegrin juror, journalist Milica Belević, was booed as soon as she walked on stage. In contrast, the crowd cheered RTS music editor Zoran Tašić as he walked on stage, even before he said ‘We’re going to try and be a bit more correct about our voting’ – to more applause – and gave 12 points to ‘Ludi letnji ples’. Spectators were already booing even the small number of points that Tašić and other Serbian jurors gave Montenegrin songs.
As the pattern continued, more Serbian jurors began their votes with comments on the Montenegrins’ behaviour, and a few audience members began to walk out – from the same complex where members of the Slovenian and Croatian branches of the League of Communists had walked out of the last all-Yugoslav Party congress in January 1990 in protest at Milošević, triggering the announcement of multi-party elections in their two republics and then in every other over the course of that year.
The Serbian tabloid Svet would indeed write, on 16 March:
‘In the same Sava Centar hall where, exactly 16 years ago, the fall of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began at the 14th Congress of the League of Communists, what little remained of that country finally fell apart too! The irony of history: on the day of Milošević’s death, Severina with her Likans and Dalmatians received ovations, and the Montenegrins were chased off stage with bottles and whistles!’
When No Name were declared the winners over Flamingosi by 64 points to 60, more than half the remaining audience started putting on their coats – while the presenters carried on trying to award No Name their winners’ trophy.
Instead, another Serbian juror, Milan Đurđević from the rock band Neverne bebe, came on stage to tell the audience ‘in the name of the people who did their job honestly – those are the people from the Serbian jury […] that we came here honestly and honourably, and […] didn’t vote using any kind of “key”,’ calling on the producers to reopen the result.
With the audience milling around in the aisles, No Name finally came on stage – only for the camera to cut away and No Name to walk back off after, it would turn out, bottles had been thrown at the band.
‘This is Wonderland!’ (‘Ovo je zemlja čuda!’) said one of the presenters, shaking his head, as Flamingosi came out instead to perform what turned into – itself the kind of hedonism–resignation–confusion one often found in post-Yugoslav Serbian film – an impromptu conga around the Sava Centar as the credits rolled.
During the next week, Serbian media kept up pressure on RTS and UJRT to re-run the final, declare Flamingosi the winners, or do anything other than send No Name to Eurovision, while RTCG contacted the European Broadcasting Union (the organisers of Eurovision) directly to ask them to recognise No Name.
This international recognition crisis, unlike Slovenia’s and Croatia’s, only lasted a few days: when RTS and RTCG failed to come to an agreement as the EBU had insisted they do, Serbia–Montenegro withdrew from Eurovision 2006 on 20 March, freeing up the automatic spot in that year’s final that Serbia–Montenegro would have had on the basis of No Name’s top-ten finish at Eurovision 2005.
By one more of the many quirks in the Evropesma story, the 11th place that Boris Novković had won for Croatia when he took part in 2005 meant that Serbia–Montenegro’s irreconcilable entry put Severina and ‘Moja štikla’ – the most controversially ‘Balkan’ song in Croatia’s Eurovision history – straight into the 2006 final.
Or as another Serbian tabloid, Blic, wrote on 20 March: ‘Only Severina is representing us in Athens.’
Hari Mata Hari, rather than Severina, would turn out the more successful bearer of the shifting Serbian/Yugoslav domestic ‘we’: ‘Lejla’ came third and cemented Joksimović’s reputation as a Eurovision entrepreneur, while ‘Moja štikla’ came a relatively disappointing twelfth, its weeks of controversy ensuring that no Croatian entry since has ever taken a similar cultural risk. (The Croatian entrant in 2017, Jacques Houdek, may risk ridicule for a song that requires him to sing in both pop and opera voices – but at least the cultural origins of the music he is mocked for will be unambiguously seen as bourgeois and European.)
Flamingosi recorded a second version of ‘Ludi letnji ples’ for domestic – as in Serbian and Montenegrin – consumption, with the names of Serbian and Montenegrin towns replacing European capitals, and the introduction changed to ‘Good evening, everybody, you’re listening to almost the winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2006.’
Serbia itself would return to Eurovision in the most successful way possible in 2007, when Marija Šerifović’s ‘Molitva’ won the contest, enabled Belgrade to host Eurovision the following year, and put a symbolic value of the so-called ‘second Serbia’ – tolerance for LGBT rights – in front of more than a hundred million Eurovision viewers.
Montenegro would fail to qualify through the Eurovision semi-finals in 2007–9, skip 2010–11, return with a pair of what most Eurovision viewers thought of as novelty songs in 2012–13 (2012’s being a satire of the Eurozone financial crisis by none other than the perpetually choleric Rambo Amadeus) and hit top-ten form in 2014–15 with songs by the calibre of Montenegrin star that Evropesma viewers in 2004–6 might have expected to see in the first place, Sergej Ćetković and Knez. Montenegro’s representative in 2017, Slavko Kalezić, offers one of the most unambiguous depictions of male/male sexual desire even for Eurovision, with an aesthetic straight from the pop-folk videos of Dejan Milićević.
What had happened, behind the scenes, to bring the fiasco of Evropesma 2006 about? The politics of nation-building through state media in Đukanović’s Montenegro strongly suggest that RTCG intended to ensure a Montenegrin entry would win Evropesma. No Name’s participation was widely rumoured to have been supported by Milo Đukanović’s brother Aco, while the Montenegrin jury president at Evropesma in 2006, Bojan Bajramović, would later tell Monitor’s Željko Milović that:
‘All the Yugoslav republics have used Eurovision to promote the new states, and that’s completely legitimate. Of course it’s legitimate to call your country ‘my love’, by association. And it was all according to the rules, so whoever thought those rules up – that’s their business. We had the right to give all the Montenegrins high points, and the favourites from Serbia nothing. That was, therefore a legitimate politicisation of Eurovision, because we didn’t break even a single rule. Let’s not hide it, that night in the Sava Centar we started the referendum campaign, and many of us weren’t even conscious of that.’
Indeed, Bajramović even suggested that the RTCG delegation would have displayed a Montenegrin flag during the live broadcast of the Eurovision final if No Name had won – an unproblematic gesture today, with Montenegro and RTCG fully recognised by the UN and EBU, but at the time could well have been viewed by the EBU as an unacceptably political display.
Ironically, the collapse of Evropesma prevented the entry from Serbia that had done most to accommodate Montenegro from going to Eurovision – but that too might not have been a bad thing for an independence campaign.
Did the breakdown of Evropesma 2006 and the resultant anti-Montenegrin invective in Serbia’s press really make Montenegrins more likely to conclude that Montenegro could not function in the same state as Serbia and vote for independence? It’s unlikely – even though the referendum took place the day after the Eurovision final.
Montenegro’s political and institutional drive towards independence was already well advanced by the time RTCG began selecting Montenegrin finalists for the national selection, let alone Evropesma itself. Moreover, only 55.5% of voters opted for independence, not very much higher than the 55% threshold on which the European Union had insisted before it would recognise the results: Evropesma did not harden the public mood in Montenegro in the way that acts of violence such as the Plitvice Lakes confrontation at Easter 1991 and, above all, the Borovo Selo massacre in May hardened the mood among wavering Croatians that independence was the only option for preserving Croatian liberties.
What the Evropesma events expose instead is something much more technical, but still significant for the cultural politics of inter-regional and international events: the capacity for a small number of jurors in a Eurovision-like competition to magnify a politicised stance into an international incident. Despite what moves towards jury transparency the EBU has tried to make, half the points available to any competitor at Eurovision – in a competition where the privilege of hosting an event worth millions to national and international subcontractors is at stake – depend on the choices of five jurors per country in a room, who can reach or be persuaded to reach a politicised consensus much more easily than hundreds of thousands of people in the viewing public.
The outcome of an independence referendum might not be on the line – and wasn’t at Evropesma 2006 – but the saga still shows on how few people these symbolic competitions can depend.
