Understanding the geopolitics, voting blocs and why the competition is more than a music contest
Australian singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem soars into the sky under a shower of fire and golden sunlight. The career-defining performance talked about at Eurovision. To be fair, it was a tough field, but with the competition fierce, even Eurovision expert Graham Norton described it as this year’s contest-winning performance.
In the end, however, Goodrem was defeated after Eurovision’s TV audience-intensive voting phase upset the scoreboard, edging out favorites France, Italy and Greece, pushing Israel and Romania into second and third places, before Goodrem finished in fourth place. catapults Bulgaria to an unassailable lead no one can compare, not even the sun goddess Delta Goodrem.
That’s the nature of Eurovision. It’s as crazy and colorful on the scoreboard as it is on stage. In 2015, Dami Im faced a similar battle. He put in a stunning performance, but the contest ended with a brutal exchange that pushed him into second place. Kate Miller-Heidke’s staging in 2019 was equally breathtaking; He literally flew away, but after unfairly harsh jury voting he too fell to ninth place.
The mood is upbeat as the Australian delegation packs its bags as it prepares to return home to Vienna this evening. Goodrem is very pleased with the result. And indeed, placing fourth in a field of 35 is a noble result. But it leaves us with a persistent question. What do we need to do to win the Eurovision Song Contest?
The answer is not as simple as sending an extraordinary singer and giving him an extraordinary song. The Eurovision Song Contest is a Rubik’s Cube of diplomacy, old family ties and geopolitical ballet. You can turn it in all directions, but you’ll never solve the puzzle until you line up the colors.
Winning, of course, is a distant goal on a busy shooting range. 35 to 45 countries compete each year. This year the total number dropped due to boycotts in five countries. The competition this year was tough. In a less heated political environment, the competition is even tougher.
A dozen of these countries were eliminated in the brutal semi-final process. Only the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) top-spending countries (England, Spain, Germany, France and Italy) are guaranteed to qualify for the grand final. (Spain was one of five countries not participating this year.) Even in the art world, money is a noisy game.
Moreover, Australia has some real competitive hurdles to overcome. The Eurovision scoring system is structured so that each country scores the others and cannot vote for its own artist and song.
But alliances have risen and fallen in 70 years of rivalry across the centuries of European geopolitics; Some are so deep that it is now impossible to change them. With all this, Australia is a completely new player after a decade in the competition.
The “Scandinavian bloc” (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland) have similar musical subcultures and naturally tend to vote for each other with the highest scores. There is a “Baltic bloc”: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Balkans vote hard when competing. (Not all of them do this every year.) And neighbors Greece and Cyprus almost always exchange their highest points, the fabled “douze” or 12 points.
Australia’s victory is certainly a complex idea for Europeans to consider. The key element is that Eurovision is a television broadcast rather than a song contest, and its organizing body, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), is an association of European and worldwide public broadcasters rather than a record company.
This means that Eurovision should be thought of first and foremost as a TV broadcast, not a music competition. (Although it has a lot of songs in it.) And even if Australia had won, we wouldn’t have been able to bring it to Australia. In Europe, it would have to be co-hosted in a European city. This adds a question to the details: Do we really want to win anyway?
Perhaps the idea of winning Eurovision is less about trying to cross the finish line first (natural enough, given Australia’s almost unhealthy obsession with winning things) and more about understanding that Eurovision isn’t just a race.
You can’t win or lose in Eurovision. You win or you lose. And fourth place is better than 24th place. We apologize to Austria, who finished today in 24th place. Can you imagine? Do you come second to last and have to pay the bill? This is certainly a mental hill to climb from Delta Goodrem’s stunning performance and fourth place.
It’s also important that there is more to Eurovision than dancing grandmothers and heavy metal orcs. Geopolitics is a word frequently used in headlines these days, but Eurovision is certainly one of the most powerful tools of soft diplomacy in the world.
While much attention is paid to thorny issues such as Israel and the war in Gaza, the reality is that the geopolitical aspect of Eurovision significantly puts Australia’s top artists in the same room as their counterparts in a range of countries whose governments have complex and often flawed relationships.
It means something in a politically fragmented world that these singers can start conversations that politicians cannot. It’s incredibly important that Australia leads many of these artistic and cultural conversations.
Of course, so is winning. That’s not the only reason we’re there. But we are an extraordinary country that needs a voting bloc and a few old family ties to play in our favor. Although it’s no disgrace to participate in Eurovision (at least 20 European countries, including Iceland, Malta, Cyprus, Poland, Armenia, Romania and Lithuania, have never won), it doesn’t hurt that we still have our eyes on the prize.
Until today, Bulgaria had not won either. This means that one day that cup will inevitably be ours.
SBS will replay the Eurovision grand final tonight at 7.30pm (AEST). Both the semi-final and grand final will be available to watch via SBS on Demand.
Read more of our 2026 Eurovision coverage
Michael Idato is general culture editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect with: X or email.
