President Zelenskiy wasn’t allowed to address the crowd, but the contest was a four-hour anti-war protest – with extra neon, says Guardian columnist Zoe Williams
, in lieu of Ukraine hosting it, because it didn’t want the event politicised. So I just want to pause for one second to remark how dumb that was.: it was the surtext and subtext, from the opening song, Stefania by the Kalush Orchestra, last year’s Ukrainian winners, to the rousing centre, a rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone sung by the Netherlands’ Duncan Laurence and also everyone else.
The aim of maintaining neutrality misunderstands either politics or Eurovision, or probably both. Eurovision has been political since its inception, with voting preferences between countries tracking political allegiances closely enough that this has its own field ofanalysing which countries are in which clusters and how that has changed over time. I feel sure there’s something self-fulfilling about it. The Nordic bloc has appeared thick as thieves since serious statistical analysis began .
The night itself has always performed a specific political function, something like a family Christmas, where warring parties bring their dispute for arbitration by the group: Turkey v Greece, Armenia v Azerbaijan, Georgia v Russia. It’s actuallylike a family Christmas, since the group never really knows how to perform its judicial role and tends to pick a side at random, depending on how drunk it is.
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