According to El País, the Spanish broadcaster RTVE has asked the EBU for the complete breakdown of the Spanish national audience voting. So far, they have received the ranking and the total numbers of votes, but not the details of how many votes went to each country.
New requests to the EBU
After the Eurovision final, the EBU released voting details and informed RTVE of the rankings of its national audience vote. In the official lexicon of the Eurovision rules, the “national audience vote” is what we usually call the televote, but it also includes the votes cast through the online platform esc.vote. Like the majority of countries this year, Spain allowed both kinds of voting to take place. In each case, only 20 votes are allowed for each method of payment (20 votes for each SIM card, 20 votes for each credit card online).
RTVE then required a more detailed breakdown of these votes, and received a new set of data that included the number of votes cast in Spain, broken down by show and by medium of vote. According to El País, these numbers are:
- For the first semi-final – 14,461 votes
- 774 calls
- 2,377 SMS
- 11,310 online votes
- For the Grand Final – 142,688 votes
- 7,283 calls
- 23,840 SMS
- 111,565 online votes
The number of votes was multiplied by 10 between both shows, a rise of 900%. The audience itself, however, only rose by approximately 325% (multiplied by 4.25), from 1,384m to 5,884m. It is likely that the engagement of viewers also rose with the final, meaning that more people would vote anyway, or that people who vote would do so more time. The fact that the Grand Final voting window opens at the beginning of the show and not at the end can also have an effect. Whether this is enough to turn a ratio of 4.5 into a ratio of 10 remains a question.
The full ranking of the Spanish audience voting, as published by the EBU, was as follows:
- 🇮🇱 Israel
- 🇺🇦 Ukraine
- 🇵🇱 Poland
- 🇪🇪 Estonia
- 🇫🇮 Finland
- 🇸🇪 Sweden
- 🇦🇹 Austria
- 🇦🇱 Albania
- 🇳🇴 Norway
- 🇫🇷 France
- 🇮🇹 Italy
- 🇳🇱 Netherlands
- 🇦🇲 Armenia
- 🇩🇪 Germany
- 🇬🇷 Greece
- 🇵🇹 Portugal
- 🇮🇸 Iceland
- 🇲🇹 Malta
- 🇱🇹 Lithuania
- 🇩🇰 Denmark
- 🇸🇲 San Marino
- 🇱🇻 Latvia
- 🇨🇭 Switzerland
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
- 🇱🇺 Luxembourg
Auditing and reviewing, as the results get political in Spain
According to El País and to RTVE’s Telediario, the Spanish broadcaster wants the full breakdown of its national voting, and calls for a potential review of the voting system. María Eizaguirre, head of communications at RTVE, has called for “a voting system that puts talent and art first“.
This debate comes as Spain’s televote gave, for the second year in a row, 12 points to Israel and 10 points to Ukraine. While both countries are taken into account when some actors raise questions about the impact of armed conflicts in the contest, political parties in Spain have mainly focused the topic on the question of Israel.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for Israel to be banned from the contest, and left-wing parties (PSOE, Sumar, Podemos) said that the voting was politicised by the right and far-right, while the right-wing and far-right parties (PP, Vox) consider that the socialist Spanish government faces a people that disagrees with its stances regarding the situation in the Middle-East.
A follow-up to Slovenia’s requests last year
This is the second year in a row that a broadcaster has asked for more transparency about their own televote. Last year, the Slovenian broadcaster RTV SLO also asked for a precise breakdown, as part of a series of questions regarding the voting, the influence of certain sponsors (a likely reference to Moroccanoil) and the disqualification of the Netherlands.
Television Slovenia therefore asks the EBU for information on the vote of Slovenian audiences: not just the number of votes, but precise information on how the Slovenian audience voted. The overall result raises some doubts, in particular the large number of ‘new’ voters online, which have not been there before.
extract of RTV Slo’s statement after the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö
It has also been confirmed that Belgium’s Flemish broadcaster VRT, in charge of their 2025 participation, has asked for more transparency about the results and for a review of the system.
What do you think about the Spanish results? Do you think politics have played a role in the results of the last two contests? Tell us more in the comments below or on social media, at @escxtra!
