Eurovision bloc voting sounds yearly sour note

TO ITS critics, the Eurovision Song Contest is a bad taste tsunami of synthetic fabrics and bum notes. Ahead of the Jedward debut at tonight’s semifinal, Eurovision fans in Düsseldorf hope they will be spared another contest cliche: bloc voting.

The temptation to vote for neighbours, friends and allies is as old as the song contest itself. But the phenomenon went viral a decade ago as tele-voting and the new map of the Balkans appeared to shift votes further east.

To counter the trend, purists complain that participants are turning increasingly to novelty acts at the expense of music. A gloomy Terry Wogan bowed out as a BBC commentator bemoaning that, with bloc voting, “an Iron Curtain has descended on Europe”.

So how bad are things really? The Germans have the answer. This year’s hosts asked a mathematician with a supercomputer to crunch the numbers and give us a definite answer. The bad news: bloc voting is a real phenomenon. The good news: it doesn’t distort the result.

Mathematician Marcus Weber analysed the last 10 years’ results and identified six clear clusters of bloc voters (see panel). For all their complaints about their eastern neighbours, the analysis shows that western Europeans are no saints either, with signs of bloc voting between the Belgians, Germans, Dutch and French.

Ireland, meanwhile, finds itself in a group of repeat offenders that includes Britain and Denmark.

The computer analysis shows interesting antipathies, too: Germany’s Lena – last year’s winner – was very unpopular among the group of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but enthusiastic Baltic countries more than made up for that, all throwing their weight behind the German candidate.

“There are many opinions on bloc voting and no doubt there are some national preferences at play,” said Prof Martin Lücke, a German Eurovision academic. “All in all, music taste wins, though.

“If eastern European countries are doing well at present, it’s because I think they often have their finger on the pulse, both musically and stageshow.”

Prof Lücke is hosting an interesting side show today in Düsseldorf’s University of Applied Sciences: the first academic conference on the Eurovision.

It is a thriving field, he says, with academics from Britain to Brazil lined up to present papers. Even the boffins though have mixed views on whether bloc voting influences the result.

British data analyst Derek Gatherer is well known in Eurovision circles with his study of usual suspects, identifying blocs including “Vikings”, Eastern and Balkan. “On at least two occasions, the outcome of the contest has been crucially affected by voting blocs,” he wrote in a 2006 paper.

Many Eurovision academics – and a European Broadcasting Union study – reject the idea that bloc voting distorts results.

Wading into the middle ground is a new Eurovision handbook, Ein bisschen Wahnsinn (A Little Madness) that documents quirky contest phenomena, including bloc voting. “Of course there is neighbourly help but it’s harmless fun and a nice battle of the regions, with a few cliches thrown in with a bit of politics,” said co-author Claas Triebel.

For him, Eurovision’s appeal is twofold: the level playing field it offers smaller countries to take on bigger neighbours as well as the nostalgia effect of Eurovisions past.

As for the claims that politics influences voting?

Eurovision lore suggests bribes from Gen Franco robbed Cliff Richard of a win in 1968.

There is a more recent claim that the UK’s Jemini got no points in 2003 because of the country’s participation in the Iraq war, “but they also sang off key”, said Triebel, “so it could be either one.”

Eurovision's Bloc-Voting Groups

Group 1:Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, San Marino.

Group 2:Denmark, Finland, UK, Ireland, Iceland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Slovakia.

Group 3:Albania, Andorra, Bulgaria, Greece, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Spain, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Hungary, Cyprus.

Group 4:Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.

Group 5:Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Austria, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovenia.

Group 6:Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Israel, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus.

MARCUS WEBER