The Friday Mixtape – Eurovision 2012 Edition
This weekend marks the only time of the year I let myself watch anything even close to a reality show: It’s Eurovision time!
For the uninitiated, here’s the gist of it: on Saturday, finalists from 26 countries will take part in what could be best described as a cross between American Idol, the World Cup and a political caucus: the winner is chosen by viewer voting, by phone, in real-time, across the continent. You can’t vote for your own country, and scores are added up on a sliding scale, so things can turn around quickly, if you impress people in enough nations. About 100 million people are expected to tune in, and that’s not counting the 39,000 people who will be watching live in and around the host site, the Baku Crystal Hall in Azerbaijan.
But there’s a whole host of stories around the event this year, including a couple of controversies that we were tipped off to by some readers, involving two particular finalists this year. Let’s start with the Ukrainian representative, Gaitana:
Gaitana, who was born in Kiev to a Ukrainian mother and a Congolese father, Gaitana has lived in Ukraine for most of her life, and almost swept her way to a Eurovision berth: not only was she the winner of the fan voting, but she was the NTU network’s second choice for the spot. So no worries, right?
Not according to Yuri Syrotyuk, a member of the country’s Freedom Party, a right-wing group. As the BBC’s Oleg Karpyak reports:
“Millions of people who will be watching will see that Ukraine is represented by a person who does not belong to our race,” said Yuri Syrotyuk, whose party is preparing to contest the parliamentary elections later this year.
“The vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Africa will take root,” he added.
A right-wing politician who’s a xenophobe? Wow, American democracy really is spreading around the globe! On the brightside, Time’s William Lee Adams says Gaitana’s compatriots seem to have her back:
The response from Gaitana’s fellow celebrities and musicians has been swift, as has the response from the public. A number of NGOs have suggested publicly that Gaitana has recourse to laws that criminalize hate speech, though the chances of Syrotyuk being successfully prosecuted are slim. “We do have legislation on racism and xenophobia,” Yana Salakhova of the International Organization for Migration told EuroNews. “But it is not being used to sentence those who are guilty and to develop a culture where people are held responsible for their actions and their words.”
Syrotyuk’s ultranationalist invective seems even more vulgar when Gaitana speaks of the pride she feels in being Ukrainian. “In my childhood I played table tennis professionally,” she remembers. “I represented Ukraine together with an Asian girl at different competitions. Nobody told us that we shouldn’t represent this country. People always rejoiced at our victories. All my achievements both in music and in sport are devoted to my beloved motherland – Ukraine!”
Meanwhile, Turkey’s representative, Cam Bonomo, is also caught in a controversy he didn’t create. Bonomo will be the first Turkish Jew to represent the country at the event, something he’s downplaying to the public:
“My family came from Spain 540 years ago,” Bonomo said in an interview on the “Aksam” news show in a video posted Jan. 11 that has gone viral. “I am Turkish and I am representing Turkey, I will go out there with the Turkish flag and represent Turkey. I am an artist, a musician. That’s all that everybody needs to know.”
Prior to his appearance on “Aksam,” radical right-wing papers had accused Bonomo of being a tool of Zionists and Freemasons.
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