The European Audience Finally Has a Lobby

"It does not matter who votes, but who counts.” This quote from Joseph Stalin was ironically my hook, when I described the questionable voting arrangements in the Eurovision Song Contest in my blogtext "The audience has no lobby". It seems that this quote came true at the ESC 2013, and just two former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Russia represent the position of audience and musicians and demand controls and transparency.

For this purpose Polad Bulbuloglu, Azerbaijani diplomat in Russia: "I want to stress that every call is money. Why should one call cost nearly 1.5 dollars? Azerbaijan gave Dina more than 2,000 votes. Where is this money and these voices? Let the European Broadcasting Union respond!" And furthermore: "Here they announce: 8, 10 points. And what do they consist of? It is said that there are some professional jury. Why do you have to hide who the jury in Belarus and in Russia are? Who are they hiding, the KGB, or what? Let them say how many people have voted. Let them explain to people what constitutes scores that are broadcast.”

Let the atmosphere of the video from the BBC work: Two senior politicians, namely the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov of Russia and Elmar Məmmədyarov of Azerbaijan complain a disagreement at a pop-music competition. Even if inconsistencies will be clarified, this would not change the final result. This leads to the conclusion that it's not about the result, but at least about a matter of principle, if not about more.

An alarming explosiveness gets this issue, if you compare the reporting of BBC with German newspapers. No facts, no information. Instead they enjoy on low level their own journalistic mockery and a supposed superiority. Whether they cannot imagine,  what it could be all about?

The dates of  whole Europe during the voting (jury and televoter) at ESC run all in one private company, to be precise in "digame mobile GmbH" in Cologne. Supervised by experts of PWC the votes are collected and distributed again, and then presented on TV. These data, which were supposedly transferred unfiltered to the TV audience, should easily made public no later than one day after the final. If not, there is something to hide. And what, everyone can imagine.

"It's nice when you have the choice"

With this statement German Anke Engelke tried to discredit Azerbaijani during the voting procedure 2012. As to the ESC it has proved that we have no choice. The voting rules are simple mockery and they are communicated as mockery. At first telephone voting is stripping audience and after that a “jury” destroys the result before the eyes of audience and fans. The secrecy is just the tip of hypocrisy and provocation. And what finally happens to the giant amounts of data collected from Europe, no one has ever questioned...

It would be a debacle when the basis of all concerted actions of raving successes, fantastic victory statistics and headlines about Turks and Eastern Bloc Mafia turn out as a large-scale fraud. But I believe that this will not happen. The datas will not be released with the result of a break down in solidarity between European countries and more withdrawals of countries from Eurovision Song Contest.

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