Is there politics in the Eurovision Song Contest? The question does not have a clear answer. Or it has depending on who you ask. The regulations of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) call the contest a “non-political event.” However, politics has crept onto the scene in a sneaky and inevitable way since the beginning of Eurovision. Ukraine's victory in 2022 was the product of a massive vote of support and sympathy for the country after Russia's invasion. And the enormous controversy this year over Israel's participation in the midst of its attacks on Palestine shows that for millions of followers it is not easy to separate songs from life.
Russia, a country that debuted in Eurovision in 1994 and was suspended in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, does not want to be left aside. The Russian Culture Ministry announced in November the plan to bring back the Intervision Song Contest, the socialist alternative to Eurovision organized by countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War that began in 1965, nine years after its European version.
“The idea of Intervisión was born in Czechoslovakia in the early sixties,” explains Dean Vuletic from Luxembourg. “It was a way to promote cooperation between East and West.” Vuletic is a historian focused on contemporary Europe and a pioneer in the academic study of Eurovision, with several books dedicated to the cultural and historical impact of the festival, such as
Postwar Europe and the
Eurovision Song
Contest .
Eurovision song
).
The academic from the University of Luxembourg explains that originally the countries of the socialist bloc showed the European Broadcasting Union their interest in participating in Eurovision, but the rejection of the EUR gave rise to the idea of an indigenous song festival behind the curtain. steel. “There were two versions of Intervisión. An edition in Czechoslovakia from 1965 to 1968 and the next, in Poland, which was from 1977 to 1980. Almost always, when talking about Intervisión, people tend to focus on the Polish version,” says Vuletic.
Although the version broadcast from Prague was not as iconic as its Polish successor, there were memorable moments and participants. “Spain participated in 1968 with Salomé,” says Vuletic, who claims to have reviewed files from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to understand what reasons the Franco regime had for sending Salomé to Czechoslovakia. “The only thing I could find is that this was a period when Spain was trying to normalize relations with Eastern Europe.”
Salomé came in third place at the 1968 Intervisión festival, according to Vuletic. A year later, she won Eurovision with
Vivo singing
from the Teatro Real in Madrid in a four-way tie with Lulu (United Kingdom), Frida Boccara (France), and Lenny Kuhr (Netherlands). Claudia Fernández, a cultural journalist who is an expert in Eurovision, explains that Spain's participation in the festival organized by the EBU, although criticized by some participants for admitting a country that was living under a dictatorship, meant, symbolically, the beginning of the end of the isolation that the country lived during the Franco regime. “Starting in Eurovision could give hope to begin the opening of this country,” highlights the journalist.
Catalan rumba on the Polish coast
Władysław Szpilman was a prestigious musician and composer who headed the Popular Music Department of Radio Poland. The story of how he survived World War II was brought to film by Roman Polanski in
The Pianist
, where the Pole is played by Adrien Brody. Less well known is how Szpilman founded the Sopot International Song Festival in 1961, a kind of San Remo on the Baltic Sea, which continues to this day. That contest was replaced in 1977 by the second version of the Intervisión Song Festival, using the same venue: the open-air amphitheater of the Opera Lesna in Sopot.
“I think the second version sought to be more global,” says Vuletic, “with participants from outside Europe, for example from Cuba.” States such as Switzerland, Finland, Canada, and the Netherlands also carried his delegation. However, Spain stands out for having been the only nation in the liberal and (more or less) democratic West to participate in all four editions of Intervisión in its Polish version, from 1977 to 1980.
The Catalan group Rumba Tres, formed by brothers Juan and Pedro Capdevila along with José Sardaña, competed in Sopot for Spain in 1978. “It was an incredible moment in our career that we remember with great affection,” the musician recalls over the phone. “Spanish Television suggested we go to the festival, apparently they were in contact with Polish television and needed Spanish representation. “It was us and [singer] Juan Erasmo Mochi.” “The festival was impressive and the people were wonderful. We had at least forty or fifty musicians,” adds the Catalan.
“I expected that there, in Poland, people would be rather cold because of the system in which they lived,” says Capdevila. But he assures that the public showed enthusiasm for Catalan rumba. The musician comments that the group won an award from the Polish press, radio and television for their interpretation of
I don't know, I don't know
. The polarization of the Cold War did not pose problems. “When we got there there was communism, so to speak. But what we did was rehearse, perform on television, and they behaved divinely with us,” Capdevila emphasizes. “We have always been pretty apolitical. We have not wanted to mix the musical with the political, although it is impossible to leave everything aside. What we did find out later, from musician friends of ours, was that there was an infiltrator. But since they saw that we were only concerned with the music and that the rest was not of our interest, they never told us anything. Someone always went with you and you wore a badge so they knew you were a foreigner. They only let people who were from the festival enter the hotel. We met people on the street and we went to the hotel and bribed the doormen, we told them: 'I'll buy you a cognac later!'
“Another different element in Sopot is the introduction of a parallel competition for record labels,” adds Vuletic. “This other contest included companies and artists from Western Europe and the United States who were left out of the contest and, curiously, made the communist Intervision something more commercial than the capitalist Eurovision. At the end of the seventies, there was a debate in the Eurovision organization whether there was too much influence of private capital in the festival, considering that it was organized by public television. There was concern that record labels would have more weight than some of the musical proposals from smaller countries.” Intervision fixed the root problem: it gave them their own competition.
Rasputin and Vladimir
Some guest artists from the capitalist West who participated in this version of Intervisión include American country
singer Johnny Cash, French
chanson
ambassador
Charles Aznavour, and Boney M, who performed...
Rasputin
.
However, the socialist contest was not unchanged by the political realities that shook Eastern Europe in the 1980s. “The festival came to an end due to the rise of the Solidarity movement and the imposition of martial law in Poland,” says Vuletic. While Intervisión 1980 was taking place at the Opera Lesna in Sopot, the nearby Gdansk shipyard was going through a strike led by Lech Walesa that would mark the beginning of the end of the communist regime in Poland. There would be no Intervision in 1981 or the years that followed and, over time, the festival founded by Władysław Szpilman would be restored, no longer under the Intervision name. It is currently one of the most important musical competitions in Central Europe and the most important in Poland.
Russia tried to bring back the Intervision Song Festival in 2008. One of the nostalgic people calling for its return, as Reuters reported at the time, was then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The setting for this version of Intervisión was Sochi, in southern Russia. Unlike previous editions, participation in this contest was limited only to former Soviet republics. 11 countries participated—originally 12, but Georgia backed out due to armed conflict with Russia that same year—with Tajikistan emerging as the victor. The contest did not continue in subsequent years.
Vuletic has a theory about the transience of this first version of the contest in the 21st century. “I think that Russia was investing a lot of resources in Eurovision and it was not giving the results they expected and that was one of the reasons to revive the festival,” indicates the historian. “It just so happens that 2008 is just when they win with Dima Bilan and that's when they lose interest in Intervisión.”
That was not the end of the problems between Moscow and the event organized by the EBU. The popularity of the event among the LGBTI community and Ukraine's use of the contest to criticize the Kremlin after the invasion of Crimea in 2014 were (they won in 2016 with the song
1944
by Jamala, with lyrics about the deportation of Tatars from Crimea in the 1940s) were, for Vuletic, two major points of friction for Russia before its suspension in 2022. The Russian Minister of Culture, Olga Lyubimova, revealed in November 2023 the desire to bring back Intervisión once again .
According to Vuletic, reviving the contest as it was originally planned is impossible. “The Russians are wrong in reviving Intervisión, because they assume that it was a Soviet idea born from the Cold War,” argues Vuletic. “But it was an initiative led first by Czechoslovakia and then by Poland, and on both occasions they reflected an attitude of openness towards the West and Western cultural influences.”
“The organizers always claim that Eurovision is not a political event and that the performances should not have political messages,” he adds. “But it is very difficult to control because everything can be political. I think that, for the EBU, there is good and bad policy. Good policy is the values of diversity and inclusion, and they have become the values of the Song Contest.”
The Spanish journalist Claudia Fernández considers that, being a festival born while Europe was rebuilding itself among the ruins of the Second World War, music served as a means to reach an ideal of peaceful coexistence. “Eurovision is a song contest between countries, and politics is intrinsic to the existence of countries,” argues Fernández. “When people tell me, to make me angry, that Eurovision is political, I respond with a resounding: of course it is.”