Bulgaria wins Eurovision after contest overshadowed by boycott over Israel’s participation
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/entertainment/bulgaria-eurovision-2026-final-intl
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/entertainment/bulgaria-eurovision-2026-final-intl
57 Comments
Visstix@lemmy.world · 70 pts · 101d
I didn't even know it was on
Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 100d
Same. Saw some results yesterday and was like 'huh? Eurovision happened??'
jimmy90@lemmy.world · -83 pts · 100d
i've never even heard of eurovision. i mean what even is a euro vision
stop lying; you're on lemmy so you've seen the israel hate
israel got second tho, mazel tov!
REDACTED@infosec.pub · 30 pts · 100d
Mid-tier schizoposting
SaltySalamander@fedia.io · 2 pts · 100d
Swing-and-a-miss
qevlarr@lemmy.world · 68 pts · 100d
Lifelong fan started my boycott two years ago. What Israel is doing, is beyond appalling. It has opened the eyes of so many people that Israel has always been doing this, that it will not stop doing this by their own initiative, so that it is our responsibility as international community to make them stop. Israel is a pariah state for me. All their enablers in Europe, including Germany and Austria, will find themselves on the wrong side of history. They have a historic responsibility to support the Jews, but that should not expand to Israel as a state. A state built on stolen land, with unequal rights, a fundamentalist theocracy, highly militaristic, unbelievable amounts of nasty propaganda, the whole country is beyond saving right now
RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world · 52 pts · 101d
Does anyone care?
Eurovision is cooked.
Eldritch@piefed.world · 15 pts · 100d
Not outside Sam. He generally seems to be pretty chill, awesome guy.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 100d
Wow. That. Hmm.
I'm glad he seems to be having fun. Really, that's what matters.
xSikes@feddit.online · 4 pts · 100d
UK should have been in the top 5. They performance was great and fun.
Eldritch@piefed.world · 4 pts · 100d
Sam is always entertaining to watch. I catch his YouTube channels fairly regularly. I listen to fairly niche stuff and Sam's Music isn't really my jam per se. He's definitely no virtuoso or genius musically but he's absolutely solid and a really good performer. I don't think most people watching realize how hard what he does is. Tuning, maintaining, and playing analog synth live.
I live in oceanway on the other side of the planet on a continent I think has no participation in the competition whatsoever? So I generally don't pay attention to it. But I was well chuffed to see that Sam was representing the UK. He's got enthusiasm and heart for days.
djdarren@piefed.social · 4 pts · 100d
Trouble is, we have a long and complicated relationship with the rest of Europe. To some extent it doesn't really matter what we send, because most people in mainland Europe don't think all that highly of us. And much of that is justified in my opinion.
Our people get drunk and lairy in their holiday resorts, we very publically opted to sever ties with the EU, and historically we've always been quite cunty.
I'm 45, and have only ever really known our national press to mostly shit on Eurovision. They treat it like a joke, so regardless of what we send, it's mostly seen as a joke by Europeans.
I felt terrible for our last few entrants, particularly Sam, and Olly a couple of years back. Last year's entry was dog shit, but they still didn't deserve no points at all. This year Sam made a genuine attempt at a song that showed a love for other European nations, and one which was a banger too, but ultimately he's fighting against 30 years of the UK's role in the EU sliding further and further into insignificance. And it's a shame.
itstoowet@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 100d
Been watching Sam for years since he was living in unused commercial buildings and constructing diy mad scientist synths. He's a real and genuine guy, he deserved more.
Eldritch@piefed.world · 1 pts · 100d
Yep, back in his circuit bending days. Pre furby organ.
Orygin@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 100d
The only thing I watched of the contest
Nora@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 100d
I don't watch eurovison, honestly I only ever hear about winners like this, and frankly this song is a banger (a bangaranga even) and the choreography is sick.
I watched it on Youtube since well, people were talking about it, and honestly I'm not gonna get this song out of my head for days.
D1re_W0lf@piefed.social · 45 pts · 100d
EuroZionvisionPaper_Phrog@lemmy.world · 25 pts · 100d
EuroviZion
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 43 pts · 100d
Israel always gets a billion votes at the contest and almost wins, but this huge success doesn't replicate on the streaming platforms where are far away in any charts
I'm guessing it's one of those:
All music streaming platforms in the world are colluding to report less listening to those songs, because of some anti-israel agenda
Eurovision public votes are allowing votes from millions of bots, because of some pro-israel agenda
meejle@piefed.world · 48 pts · 100d
Not necessarily bots, but astroturfing, yes.
The Israeli government spends a lot of time and money on targeted ads and campaigning to get people to vote for their song. Not just in Israel, either, these are Israeli embassy accounts:
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 100d
Also if you saw all the Moroccanoil sponsorship all over Eurovision this year - let's just say that company is not Moroccan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroccanoil
hansolo@lemmy.today · 6 pts · 100d
They don't care because you pay to vote. Israel is (directly or indirectly) throwing millons of Euros at the EBU and only coming in at second place. Everyone knows about the ballot stuffing.
RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 100d
Or 3 the boycott is significant so the far right are a significant part of the audience.
Airheadgreg@lemmy.wtf · -3 pts · 100d
If there's opposition to Israel in the voting, the votes are split across 24 other entries, whereas the support for Israel is for a single entry. It's not really nefarious, just detracts from the quality of the performances.
Goodeye8@piefed.social · 30 pts · 100d
You're missing the point. It's not about opposing Israel through voting, it's the questionable correlation between voting and the actual popularity of the song. The televotes are supposed to be based on popularity of the song because voters vote for the songs they like the most. There should be a strong correlation between the amount of votes a song gets and the amount of listens it gets on a streaming service because why would you vote for a song you don't want to listen to. Last year Israel got the most votes from the public, their song has listened only 17 million times on Spotify. Meanwhile the runnerups Estonia and Sweden both had 120 million listens. In fact if you look at previous years pretty much all televote winners have had a lot of listens (the lowest I saw in the last 5 years was around 80 million). It's only Israel who wins the televote but can't even reach 20 million listens. The correlation that should be there simply isn't there.
WanderWisley@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 100d
Congratulations Bulgaria, take that L Israel, also FUCK Israel.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml · 19 pts · 100d
Bulgaria's tourism minister must be shitting it right now though lol. "We have to host WHAT next year?"
bramkaandorp@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 99d
Israel won by being allowed to compete.
luipaard0011@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 100d
and FUCK Trump! I mean, FUCK Netanyahu and FUCK America!
SaltySalamander@fedia.io · -8 pts · 100d
Fuck you too ;)
random_character_a@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 100d
Well Finlands religious nutters and MAGA-style right wing Elon Musk fan boys were certainly provoked to vote for Israel... again.
Song was not that special and we ended up giving Israel 12 points... again.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 100d
We tend not to vote in the first place, especially when votes are the most expensive in the entire EU - cheapest was 0,13€ in Denmark, while it was 1,5€/vote here. Someone calculated that based on some previous years with 10 max votes, you could easily get the first place with just something like 1000 people voting the max amount. (And possibly even a lot fewer, as it was max 10 votes per payment method, so one person could use multiple to stack on votes)
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 100d
A few hundred people can buy enough votes for an entire country. NYT released an article about it a few days ago.
roserose56@lemmy.zip · -14 pts · 100d
Links or it didn't happen.(Not trying to cancel you, but it would nice to add links or something similar about your claims.)
zaphod@sopuli.xyz · 25 pts · 100d
Wikipedia has a detailed breakdown of the voting results for jury and televoting. Finland gave 12 points to Israel in the televoting, the jury gave no points to Israel.
The_Cunt_of_Monte_Cristo@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 100d
This is the first Eurovision I didn't watch since 2003. Well done EBU.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 21 pts · 100d
Israel isn't part of the EuroAsian continent. Regardless of whether they're committing a genocide (they are), they shouldn't be included. Also, fuck 'em.
hansolo@lemmy.today · 11 pts · 100d
Neither is Australia. They both got included way back when because of "large European diaspora."
Objectively, the Israeli songs always suck IMO, and a couple Aussie ones have been cheesy bangers.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 0 pts · 100d
I'm happy to hear that Aussies are musically gifted. They shouldn't be in Eurovision either.
hansolo@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 100d
Their entries are occasionally so laughably tongue in cheek, no one is ever upset by them. A million other things about Eurovision get people spun up.
Like, do you watch Eurovision? If not, why hold such strong opinions about this thing that doesn't affect you at all?
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 0 pts · 99d
Nope, never.
Why do I care? Because Israel commits war crimes.
I've never watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or America's Got Talent, or So You Think You Can Dance (I'm in USA). I don't like that sort of content.
But I'd care a lot if we let someone from a genocidal nation, that literally indoctrinates their children to think of an entire people as less than human, to compete on our shows. Fuck Israel (not Jews, just that country).
Tja@programming.dev · 8 pts · 100d
I say we kick out Israel and bring Canada or New Zealand or South Korea.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu · 1 pts · 100d
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Broadcasting_Area
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · -1 pts · 99d
What, so everyone who can hear Radio Free Europe should be able to compete in whatever stupid national contest we have in the USA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 100d
Sure, and Israel came in second.
Malyca@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 100d
As usual we're in the news for all the wrong reasons.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 101d
hopesdead@startrek.website · 16 pts · 101d
Didn’t ABBA come to fame from a Eurovision win?
FaceDeer@fedia.io · 10 pts · 100d
I don't see how that impacts the meme.
hopesdead@startrek.website · 6 pts · 100d
I was just asking.
Griffus@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 100d
ABBA, Celine Dion and countless others.
Ioughttamow@fedia.io · 12 pts · 100d
PLAY JA JA DING DONG!
merdaverse@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 100d
Every year there's maybe one decent song and a bunch of generic pop crap. It's famous because it's a manifestation of modern chauvinism in musical form.
hansolo@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 100d
I can't get past the abysmal mistake of Alice from Switzerland not even going to the Final.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 100d
TerrorVision
radiofreebc@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 101d
FaceDeer@fedia.io · 16 pts · 100d
Eurovision has entries from the members of the European Broadcasting Union, which started out Europe-centric but now has members from other places too - notably Israel, Morocco, and Australia.
blackbeans@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 100d
To be honest I would rather see only European countries. Adding these countries and especially the controversial Israel doesn't help Europe to unite.
I also don't really like the over the top way the festival is presented, it looks very fake and glamorous to me. I don't associate myself with the fake and glamorous