The Eurovision Song Contest is wrapping up this afternoon, and while the organizers of the international singing competition have tried—in defiance of popular sentiment, repeated interruptions by protesters, and, if we’re being frank, the evidence of reality—to contend that the event has no connection to the planet’s wider political turmoil, at least one contestant has taken a novel tack to try to get through their time on Austria’s Wiener Stadthalle stage: Rehearsing to the sound of faking booing and heckles. You know, for practice.
The contest in question is, unsurprisingly, Israel’s Noam Bettan, the latest sacrificial singer to bear the brunt of public displeasure with his country’s ongoing actions in Gaza ever since the October 7, 2023 attacks. Five countries—Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland, and Slovenia—have boycotted the annual competition over Israel’s participation this year, with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez writing on social media on Friday that “We will not be in Vienna, but we will do so with the conviction that we are on the right side of history.”
This clearly wasn’t unanticipated—at least on the part of Bettan and his team, who’ve apparently spent the last several months training him to perform through multiple types of boos, protests, and other interruptions, according to a report this week from THR. That training presumably came in handy earlier in the competition, when “Free Palestine” chants and booing occasionally attempted to interrupt Bettan’s performance of love ballad “Michelle,” as they previously did for Israel’s last several contestants. (Bettan’s final performance, earlier this afternoon, apparently went more smoothly. Votes for Eurovision, with Finland’s Linda Lampenius and Pete Parkkonen as predicted favorites to win, are currently being tabulated.)
The European Broadcasting Union, the group that puts on Eurovision—and which arguably defied its own apolitical stance in 2022, when it ruled that Russia would be excluded from the competition due to its aggressive military actions in Ukraine—put out a statement today trying to reassert that this phone-in musical popularity contest between countries in no way functions as a stand-in for wider tensions or dynamics. “The EBU is not the European Union or the European Commission. We’re not the United Nations, so we don’t need to make any political decisions,” the EBU’s deputy director general said in a statement. Meanwhile: Apparently a big win for the “synthetic boos for training purposes” industry.
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