This is excellent. Truly a joke deserving of a more active platform

I think it's useful propaganda at home. "See look, most Europeans still love us and vote for our song, even countries like Ireland and Spain who's governments criticise us, their people gave us 12"

Abroad, I think this year they were using it to try and recentre the conflict around October 7th.

A sophisticated state actor has a lot to gain by trying to influence the vote. Just three years ago we had the 2022 jury vote scandal involving Georgia, Romania, Azerbaijan, San Marino and Montenegro.

Im not sure why people are so resistant to the idea it still happens.

Yeah, that's possible. Some of that is grass roots and some is state "nudged" (they've apologised for running ads).

I did see someone show that there was a correlation between nations with lower barriers to esim registration and higher televotes for Israel - but I haven't checked it yet.

Your assumption is that normies don't care - and (for the second year in a row) they also coincidentally and consistently (across several different countries) happened to think one pretty average song was clearly better than 25 others.

It is much more likely that political factors are at play.

But if you want to fit into word play it's gotta be Icetagruppen.

We (Leinster) obviously don't have a no dickheads policy. How would we have kept Johnny?