This is the most divisive Eurovision ever

The most famous scene of this Eurovision 2024 is a meme: one of the presenters asks an audience member for their phone and tries to demonstrate how the televoting app works except, in a worldwide live broadcast, right at that moment, the phone receives a deluge of Grindr notifications with their unmistakable sound. Amused, the presenter hands the phone back to the audience member: «I'll just give you back your phone. It seems like you're having a wonderful week here in Malmö». And the feeling is that that audience member was truly the only one having fun – given that this edition of the Eurovision has been dominated by a climate of tension such that the joy being staged on the stage sounds almost jarring compared to the news coming from Malmö: a huge pro-Palestine protest is being organized in the city at this moment (according to CNN, more than 20,000 people are expected) while the government tightens security by deploying more police; yesterday, in Belgium, a TV station interrupted the transmission to publish a written protest; in the arena, the performance of the Israeli singer was drowned out by a huge roar of boos that was digitally removed in the television broadcasts and even the performance of Eric Saade, who wore a keffiyeh on his wrist, was removed from social media; many artists have voiced their complaints or have been on the verge of leaving; the tension in the city, whose population is 25% Muslim, makes the artists themselves reluctant to perform during the day while the organizers continue to repeat that the competition is apolitical, concealing the pure terror of what would happen if there were intruders on stage during the performance of the Israeli singer as happened in 2018 during the turn of the English.

The feeling is that of a Eurovision running on dual tracks: on one hand, there is the enthusiasm of the vast community of fans following the competition, mostly Europeans, and truly «united by music» as the competition's slogan says, who fill Twitter with comments and memes about the various performances; on the other hand, there is the growing sense of concern for the turbulent atmosphere of protests and tensions swirling around the competition in a city that, even in more peaceful conditions, already appears under pressure from the 100,000 visitors from 80 different countries. On a purely perceived level, however, this year's edition has highlighted all the rigidity of the control system that has been picking through the song lyrics and even the body paint of some of the singers in search of peace messages to expunge or amend. All exacerbated by the jarring oscillation between the very serious, if not tragic, tones of performances from countries like Israel and Ukraine (which included animations on stage resembling the light trails of Russian bombs raining down on the country) and the playful or cheerfully insane performances of other artists like Windows95Man or Baby Lasagna. And even though it will certainly not be on the Eurovision stage that any political issues will be resolved or any conflicts won or lost, there remains the feeling that the atmosphere of the upcoming episodes will be cheerful, optimistic, and joyously kitschy as long as no one objects or points out the huge elephant in the room. Almost as if the precondition for good humor were acquiescence or selective blindness – officially the show must go on.

Yet in the past, politics had already entered the competition. In its genesis, for example, which lies in the ambitions of internationality and renewal sought by a Europe that was finally rising again and soon would face the post-war economic boom. But also in various episodes of its long history: controversies and threats of boycott arose already with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in the 1970s; the endless issues of the 2009 edition which saw problems between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Red Army Choir take the stage singing, the almost forced withdrawal of Georgia and of course the protests of the LGBTQ+ community led by Nikolai Alekseev and ending with the arrest of twenty demonstrators; not to mention of course the exclusion of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and the many discussions sparked by Israel's participation that have been going on since the 1970s and have obviously become much more dramatic today. Nor were there lacking other complaints and controversies when in 2012 Krista Siegfrids kissed her own companion simulating a same-sex marriage infuriating both the Greek and Turkish press; when Conchita Wurst's victory was opposed by several countries; when Ukraine in 2017 prevented the Russian singer who had performed in Crimea from entering the competition. As can be seen from this brief list, the Eurovision stage is a highly political place, especially when the "ecumenical" and pacifist mission of the event clashes with the moralism, righteousness, and conservatism of national governments or entire segments of the population.

Among the most confusing cases of this edition, for example, there is that of Olly Alexander. The English singer, after declaring himself pro-Palestine, still decided to compete with a performance so sexually charged (imagine half-naked men, jockstraps, explicit references to cruising, and so on) that it has now angered both Queers for Palestine activists, who had asked him to boycott, and conservatives who instead criticized the overly explicit nature of his performance in a kind of tangle of controversies that bring together all the hot topics on which the two sides of society clash daily. In short, the pacifist optimism that the Eurovision has always wanted to be a symbol of is increasingly outdated and inadequate to reconcile the fractures and contradictions of a Europe that is no longer the post-war one and that, above all, today faces a completely new category of problems ranging from immigration to monetary policies, from abortion to the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community passing through the sense of alarm surrounding freedom of the press and opinion in a society that is both apathetic and fanatical. Perhaps what makes this Eurovision less satisfying is precisely the fact that it is difficult to reconcile the geopolitical tension we see in the world with the somewhat frivolous lightheartedness of the competition as well as with its utopian vision of a world «united by music» that is increasingly difficult to believe in.