NORWAY’S ALEXANDER Rybak made history at Saturday night’s Eurovision Song Contest with a landslide victory. His song Fairytale earned a record total of 387 points from juries and televoters from the 42 participating countries; the second-place finisher, Iceland’s Yohanna, earned a distant 218 points.
Norway’s win marked the first time since 2000 that the Eurovision was won by a country from the contest’s traditional western European heartland, breaking a string of first-time victories from eastern and southern European nations that many in the west attributed to neighbourly and diasporic voting.
Norway had won Eurovision twice before, in 1985 and 1995.
Fairytale, which Rybak wrote himself, is a clever concoction clearly designed to appeal to voters across nationalities and age groups; it combines a catchy folk-music riff (which Rybak plays on violin) and Russian-style cossack dancing, with a familiar boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl narrative.
The charisma that helped Rybak win was in further evidence at the press conference, when he self-effacingly said he was not the best singer in the competition. “I really consider myself a violin player first. But I just had a story I had to tell.”
The 23-year-old Rybak is originally from Belarus, and responded to questions in fluent Russian, English and Norwegian; his mixed nationality undoubtedly added to his success in the contest.
He received votes from every possible country, with maximum 12-point scores coming from nations across Europe, including Ukraine and Croatia.
This was the first year of a new system whereby voting was split between national juries of music professionals and televoting.
Contest organisers will surely be happy with the geographic range of countries represented in the top 10 finishers (in order: Norway, Iceland, Azerbaijan, Turkey, the UK, Estonia, Greece, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Armenia).
While some of these entries favoured elaborate staging (Greece) and somewhat stereotypical representations of their culture (Turkey, Armenia), there was also a much stronger emphasis on simplicity of presentation and song quality than in recent years.
Voting results released late on Saturday night revealed that Ireland’s act, Sinead Mulvey and Black Daisy, were 11th in Thursday night’s semi-final, thus narrowly missing out on a berth in the final.
The spirit of festivity around the contest was marred on Saturday by the violent reaction of Moscow police to a gay rights protest timed to coincide with Eurovision, which has a strong gay fan base. Protesters were arrested on the campus of Moscow State University; footage of them being aggressively handled by police has circulated widely.
Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov referred to a gay pride march planned for Friday as “satanic”. It was the banning of that march that prompted Saturday’s protests.