EUROVISION 2019: In the corrected official ranking on Wednesday, France moved from 14th to 16th place in the Eurovision 2019 competition. Explanations
- The Eurovision final took place on Saturday in Tel Aviv and ended with the victory of Dutchman Duncan Laurence.
- On Wednesday, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) explained that the results had been skewed by “human error” and released the corrected rankings.
- If the victory of the Netherlands is not questioned, other countries win or lose places. France, for example, is down two positions.
Spectacular turn of events ! While the Eurovision 2019 ended on the night of Saturday to Sunday in Tel Aviv (Israel) by the victory of the Dutchman Duncan Laurence with his song Arcade , the European Union of radio-television (EBU), which crowns the event, revealed on Wednesday that the ranking was wrong. Blame it on a “human error”. The corrected list, which has just been published, shows that the blunder had no impact on the Top 4. In contrast, a handful of countries, including France, play the game of musical chairs in the ranking. Explanations.
What happened ?
On Monday, May 13th, during the dress rehearsal, the national professional juries voted to decide the countries competing in the first semifinal of Eurovision. Each juror had to keep his preferences secret until the end of Saturday’s final. However, the members of the Belarussian jury have not kept their commitment and have publicly discussed their preferences and points awarded. They broke the rules. The organisers of Eurovision have therefore removed from office. For the final, the vote of the jury of Belarus was replaced by a top 10 calculated according to an algorithm. The method used? The ranking was based on the results of the juries of countries with voting patterns similar to those in Belarus. This is where the human error occurred: instead of being attributed to the ten countries that came at the top of this learned calculation, the points of the Belarusian jury were awarded to the last ten, as suggested by the website Wiwibloggs Monday. . Even if these results could seem surreal (the main points going to Israel, Estonia and Germany that ended at the bottom of the ranking), they were still validated.
Can’t stop laughing at Belarus jury votes 🤣 #Eurovision2019 #Eurovision pic.twitter.com/l7s5B5KwJG
— Logri (@logri19) 20 May 2019
What effect on the ranking?
In a statement released on Thursday , the EBU and Ernst & Young say “deeply regret that this mistake was not identified earlier.” They then corrected the ranking before making it official. Regarding the first four, nothing changes, and the victory of the Netherlands is not called into question. Other countries, on the other hand, win or lose several places in the standings. France thus passes from 14th to 16th place ( Bilal Hassani keeps its 105 points ). It is doubled by Cyprus and Malta who climb respectively from 15th to 13th place and from 16th to 14th place.
On the Top 10 side, Northern Macedonia moved from 8th to 7th place and it turns out that it won the vote of professional juries and not Sweden. Sweden, too, has nothing to complain about because it takes 5th place in Norway and gives it its 6th place. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, fell from 7th to 8th place. In the second part of the ranking, Albania (17th of the new classification) and Serbia (18th) have reversed their position, as well as San Marino (19th) and Estonia (20th). At the back of the pack, Germany shrinks by an armful and is 25th and penultimate, instead of the … Belarus, finally
Avant / Après !! Les résultats de l’#Eurovision 2019 ont changé ! 😱😱 pic.twitter.com/RV5EgDFwgK
— Margaux Savarit (@Margaux_Savarit) 22 May 2019
And now ?
The EBU and its partners Digame and Ernst & Young, in their press release, say they will “review the process and the control methods in place to prevent this from happening again”. Steven Clerima, the head of the French delegation posted a tweet in the evening surely referring to this mess: “the error is human” . Nevertheless, it is a serious quack for the biggest international musical contest.
