Eurovision Song Contest: – Complete confusion:

Latest news: On Friday afternoon, the Italian broadcaster RAI confirmed the scandal, and apologized for the vote slip. The Italian Informazione reports.

MALMÖ (Dagbladet): On Thursday evening, Norwegians in their thousands were probably sitting on the edge of their sofas when the votes in the Eurovision Song Contest’s second semi-final were counted.

In the end, we were able to let loose the jubilation when it became known that Norway and Gåte have progressed to the grand final on Saturday.

There was also tension about whether Israel would continue to participate in the music competition, and it turned out that Israel and Eden Golan (20) had also been voted through to the final.

In Italy, it was apparently published what percentage of the votes Golan received, which creates complete confusion.

Raises eyebrows

The Eurovision Song Contest has been heavily criticized after the EBU stated that it was not appropriate to ban Israel from this year’s music competition.

These went further

Both in Norway and in several other countries, there have been calls to ban Israel from this year’s competition because of the war in Gaza and the many civilian victims.

Thus, there was tension attached to how many votes Israel would get for its performance.

The Italians apparently got an answer to this. On X, formerly Twitter, several users shared a clip from the broadcast where you can see how many votes the Italians gave the various contributions. There you could see that Golan had collected a whopping 39.31 percent of the votes from Italian viewers.

During the X post, several express confusion as to whether this was a mistake on the part of the Italian broadcaster Rai.

According to the newspaper La Republica, the dissemination of the results of the vote is prohibited according to the EBU’s rules. Broadcasters are not allowed to release the full results of the voting during the semi-finals. The full voting results will only be published after the final.

What kind of consequences this will have for Rai if this is true is unknown.

Dagbladet has tried to get in touch with Rai, so far without success.

Furthermore, La Republica writes that the entertainment department of Prime Evening on Viale Mazzini has announced that they will come up with an explanation for what has happened on Friday.

– Think this is artificial

Håkon Røssum, head of the enthusiast website Eurovision Norway, believes it is serious if Rai has published the votes.

– If this is true, then it is the biggest Eurovision voting scandal of all time. In such an inflamed year, we can only guess the consequences of this for TV 2.

Journalist, presenter and commentator Jostein Pedersen takes the “blister” with a pinch of salt.

– Many years of therapy required

– I don’t believe in it until it is official, he says to Dagbladet.

– As far as I understand, this was announced shortly after the semi-final is over, and it is very quickly. I think this is artificial.

If it turns out that the numbers from Italy are correct, Pedersen is not necessarily surprised that many choose to vote for Israel.

– I think Israel gets many sympathy votes, just as much as Ukraine gets sympathy votes. Both have a starting point in war and misery, so there is sympathy and antipathy. But in Eurovision you can’t vote against anyone, only for someone. I think both will get an awful lot of sympathy votes.