After trying and failing to steal Eurovision last year, Israel came back with a plan to rig the competition at the second attempt, but outrageously it was foiled by Austria. Israel wanted to take Eurovision like it was a house owned by Palestinians, but Austria had the audacity to win Israel’s prize and it did not even resort to cheating. Truly, this is the worst thing Austria has done since it gave the world Hitler.
Eurovision seemed to be going so well when organisers hid the fact everyone hates Israel by replacing boos with AI-generated cheers. You know those divorced men who can’t get a girlfriend so they hire someone to be their date? It was kind’a like that. Israel paid for a fake audience so it didn’t look like a massive loser.
Obviously, a fake audience wasn’t going to be enough to win, but Israel had other tricks up its sleeve. It was supposed to keep the next part of its plan secret, but the people who brag about their war crimes on TikTok aren’t the brightest bunch. Israelis couldn’t help boasting of their heroic efforts which involved using multiple credit cards to vote hundreds of times in different countries. Israel has demanded an investigation into how Austria won, even though Israel cheated.
The high popular vote for a massively unpopular Israel can be explained as an artefact of Eurovision’s voting system: it suffers from the disadvantages of first-past-the-post, and if a country is most of the focus of discussion, it has to only be 1/25 as popular as it is unpopular, as the vote against it is spread between other contestants. Given that most people don’t vote and you can vote as many times as you can afford to pay (well, 20 times per phone number, but SIM cards are cheap), that escalates it.
In fact, it is a plausible hypothesis that Israel won by enough of a margin to win the contest (on the strength of a small number of motivated voters and a split opposition), but the EBU doctored the result to give Austria a narrow win, as having 2026 hosted on the ruins of Gaza by the perpetrators of the genocide would have destroyed the event, if not the EBU itself.