Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to today’s statistical blog, which relates to something about which I have some passionate beliefs: the democratic process at national finals, or in other words, letting people have their say in who represents them at Eurovision.
Over the last few years, it has seemed like the momentum has been away from internal selection and towards national finals - for me, generally a good thing given that they raise the profile of your representatives in their respective countries, ensure that the act is already ready to make a convincing performance that will win over voters, and allow the choice to reflect the taste of a nation (or at least, its eurofans) rather than the arbitrary choices of a broadcaster.
64% of all top 10 songs in the past five years have come from national finals, with 6 of the past 7 winners having emerged from them. We have seen some unlikely countries like France abandon internal selections for the first time in ages. In 2015, about half of all countries opted for internal selections, but as a result of this trend, that number is down to just 13 this year. However, a top 3 that comprised of two internal selections and one internally selected song from a national final-winning artist certainly gave pause to think to other delegations, a few of whom - like Armenia and Switzerland - abandoned their national finals to pick internally this year.
So, 28 of 41 countries had some sort of national final involved in picking their song, artist or both, but not all NFs are created equal. Only two - Georgia and Spain, the latter having learnt their lesson from the Manel Navarro scandal - have a 100% televote in the final selection. Today, we’ll have a look at all the other national final formats, some of which are about as democratic as an internal selection.
The most common NF format by far, which I call the Swedish model, is modelled after the arguably most famous NF, Melodifestivalen - and involves a 50/50 split between the televoters and the jury, often international in its composition in the aim of simulating Eurovision and picking a cross-culturally effective act, albeit often at the expense of something unique from that country. 11 countries have the Swedish model, and a lot of the “new” NFs that emerged this year or last have notably replicated it. This is one of the formats whose rationale I can most understand, but in practise, it’s less than ideal. In Sweden, the juries have a lot more power than the televoters because their points are usually far less dispersed than the public’s, whilst in France, the opposite has happened two years in a row.
Second after that is the similar Estonian model, which has the same jury-televote split up until a superfinal in which only the public’s vote counts. This ensures a big say for the jury in determining who qualifies to the last stage, but leaves the final choice to the public. 3 countries have been known for this format - Iceland and Norway - but this year, Montenegro ditched its 100% televote system in favour of this model.
Another model that has seen growth this year is the Hungarian model, where the public have the final say - but only after the jury has had an exclusive or near-exclusive say in who qualifies to the superfinal stage. This has somehow worked wonders for A Dal, and whilst one of Hungary’s neighbours, Romania, ditched this model this year, another picked it up, Slovenia. The UK’s bizarre “sing-off” where they made a big deal of choosing between two versions of one song, only to exclusively allow 3 dubious jurors to make that decision, can be classified somedeal under this model too.
We also saw an expansion of the Italian model - where the jury and televote make up less than 50% of the vote each and a third representative or expert group is drawn in - because of Latvia’s adoption of a more complicated model including in-person voting in a mall, of the current Israeli model, where only an artist is chosen and the song is picked internally - this is how Finland formatted UMK for a second year and how Malta chose to replace MESC - and of the Albanian model or “open internal selection” to Belarus, where the process of picking a song is public, but only juries have a say in it. We also saw the sad return of the old Maltese model whereby the televote is a small fraction of the jury - in Romania, the public only had one seventh of the vote.
Personally, I will never truly understand restricting the public’s ability to make a democratic choice of who their representative will be or allowing outside folk to override a public decision. I’d sooner see smaller national finals where every song is one the broadcaster thought would be a worthy winner and where the winner was picked 100% by televote than the current hodgepodge of systems that are semi-democratic at best and, like in 2017, the year of National Final fiascos, can undermine public confidence in the selection process.
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
snowghoul
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
prguitarman
