Europe's Cheesy Musical Proxy War

Ivan Plis

Politics, Eurasia

This year's Eurovision Song Contest was a microcosm of regional dynamics.

The Eurovision Song Contest isn’t supposed to matter. It’s the vehicle that launched ABBA and Céline Dion to stardom, the realm of ill-conceived, earnest performances that are as divorced from good musical taste as they are from the rest of the real world. Commentators on this year’s inaugural U.S. broadcast (on Logo TV, home to RuPaul’s Drag Race and seemingly little else) variously explained the spectacle as “a rave at the UN,” “the gay Olympics” and “American Idol meets the Hunger Games.”

And yet at the end of Saturday’s final the champion for Ukraine, a Crimean Tatar named Jamala wept before a global audience of two hundred million and reprised her winning song, “1944.” Of her grandmother’s deportation at the hands of Stalin—and perhaps more recent events as well—she starkly sang: “They come to your house / they kill you all / and say, ‘we’re not guilty.’” In a further act of defiance, the song’s refrain is in neither English nor Ukrainian, but in the Tatar minority’s own language.

Other recent winners wrought victory from vague platitudes, catchy hooks and generic rhymes. But Ukraine’s “1944” is somber and hefty by Eurovision standards, having won the trophy though a combination of artistry, grievance and some good old-fashioned geopolitics.

Eurovision has always has an undercurrent of political subtext, with viewers in the forty-six participating countries voting for performers from allied nations, or for the enemies of their enemies; selecting the genuine best song is, at best, an afterthought. And many countries conform to stereotypes: the French are the least likely to submit a song in English, while the Brits tend to be as reluctant in Eurovision as they are in Brussels.

But this year, unspoken rivalries bubbled to the surface. Russia engineered a dream team of Eurovision veterans to mount a stage show that resembled 2015’s slickly forgettable Swedish champion, winning viewers’ aggregate popular vote but falling short in the individual national juries.