I think we swedes will start a war with rest of Europe if we don't get to the finals And if we doesn't get top 5 in the finals we will stop talking to everyone until next time. (and we are not the only one voting for our neighbors...)
I know Scandinavian countries are not the only ones voting for each other. I did not mean it as an accusation, but just as a joke.
Though since you mentioned it, and since the subject is very interesting indeed, here’s how Dr Derek Gatherer (a geneticist who studied ESC voting patterns for the last 14 years) organised the participating countries into voting blocs which regularly award each other high points in his 2006 academic study, Comparison of Eurovision Song Contest Simulation with Actual Results Reveals Shifting Patterns of Collusive Voting Alliances.
He also gave the blocs interesting names:
“The Balkan Block” (green). Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey, Bosnia Herzegovina, Albania and Romania)
“The Warsaw Pact” (red). Poland, Russia and the Ukraine.
“The Viking Empire” (blue). Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania
“The Partial Benelux" (orange). (Belgium and the Netherlands)
“The Pyrenean Axis” (yellow). Spain and Andorra.
[Countries award points to their neighbours regularly even if they aren’t part of the same bloc. There are also always votes based on the diaspora (Romania, for example, often gets high votes from Italy and Spain and vice versa).]
It is a matter of debate whether bloc voting is a product of conscious political alliances or whether it can be explained by the tendency for culturally close countries to have similar musical tastes. It’s probably a bit of both.
Gatherer found that there were originally just a few voting blocs. For example, he noted Greece-Cyprus voting partnership, which probably originated as an expression of political solidarity and was later copied by voters in other countries as a means of obtaining votes in return. Since 2000, though, Eurovision voting blocs have become bigger and more divisive.
Gatherer said Eurovision bloc voting is “a horizontally spreading cultural behaviour that has progressively colonised the contest”.
But regardless of all of this, the Eurovision Song Contest was created in the 1950s as a “light entertainment programme”, with the aim of bringing the countries of Europe together after WWII.
I personally think we should try to live up to that spirit and just not care so much. I mean, we must *pretend* to care, but not *really* care.
(Please don’t start a war)