Should Azerbaijan have won the Eurovision Song Contest?
For years, the Eurovision Song Contest has been decided through a popular vote.
However, this year they decided to give half of the voting power to professional juries in each country.
But what was the consequence of this?
They have now revealed what the result would have been if all power had been with the juries, but for some reason they haven’t done the same for the popular vote.
Could this be because the winner of the popular vote was Azerbaijan?
I’ve put the popular and jury votes into a table and subtracted one from the other:
Azerbaijan | 112 | 207 | 95 |
Norway | 312 | 387 | 75 |
Turkey | 114 | 177 | 63 |
Greece | 93 | 120 | 27 |
Russia | 67 | 91 | 24 |
Albania | 26 | 48 | 22 |
Armenia | 71 | 92 | 21 |
B&H | 90 | 106 | 16 |
Spain | 9 | 23 | 14 |
Finland | 12 | 22 | 10 |
Romania | 31 | 40 | 9 |
Ukraine | 68 | 76 | 8 |
Sweden | 27 | 33 | 6 |
Estonia | 124 | 129 | 5 |
Portugal | 64 | 57 | -7 |
Lithuania | 31 | 23 | -8 |
Croatia | 58 | 45 | -13 |
Moldova | 93 | 69 | -24 |
Germany | 73 | 35 | -38 |
Iceland | 260 | 218 | -42 |
Denmark | 120 | 74 | -46 |
UK | 223 | 173 | -50 |
Israel | 107 | 53 | -54 |
Malta | 87 | 31 | -56 |
France | 164 | 107 | -57 |
Of course, the right-hand column does not show exactly what people voted, only how much they diverged from the juries, so perhaps Norway would still have won.
But I think it’s beyond doubt that Azerbaijan would have been very close to winning, and that the UK and especially France would have been huge disasters had they not introduced juries.
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