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Vienna: When Australian singer Delta Goodrem walks onto the Eurovision stage in Vienna this morning, she will be walking into what could be a unique moment in Australian history. We have fielded Eurovision competitors for more than a decade, but never before has the national momentum reached a fever pitch quite like this.
The journey to the Eurovision stage is a tough one. It involves a pre-competition season of European fan events. It needs a new song which can simultaneously impress professional music juries and earn the love of Eurovision fans, whose passion for the annual competition verges on cultish.
There are more things that can go wrong than will likely go right, and yet Goodrem has emerged from that storm an unstoppable force of serenity and grace. The mood in Vienna overnight verged on frenzied. In Delta’s orbit, it is a sphere of calm.
For Australia, the Eurovision journey is as existential as it is colourful. Our place in a European music competition is always up for debate, even as it seems like a natural expression of our European history and the plain ambition of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to turn Eurovision itself into a global brand.
Regardless of the outcome, Goodrem’s successful campaign this year will momentarily silence the critics who found voice recently, as a number of Australian entrants had their Eurovision campaigns cut short, cut down in the semi-finals.
This year’s first semi-final sent Greece, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Moldova, Israel, Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania and Portugal to the final. The second sent through Bulgaria, Ukraine, Norway, Romania, Malta, Cyprus, Albania, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Australia.
In the grand final, those 20 countries were up against four of the so-called “Big Five” – the biggest members of the European Broadcasting Union - France, Germany, Italy and the UK – and the host country, Austria, all of whom book final slots automatically.
The fifth member of the Big Five, Spain, withdrew in protest over the inclusion of Israel, following the war in Gaza.
Four other countries joined the boycott: Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia, reflecting a deeply felt schism that illuminated a growing problem for the EBU: how it handles the delicate relationship between soft diplomacy and the perception that Eurovision is being used as a political proxy.
The Eurovision grand final is, in the final count, a four-hour-long marathon of song, spectacle and abacus-style mathematics.
The contest’s antiquated scoring system, which involves crossing from the main stage in the host country to each of the participating countries for them to assign scores from two to eight, 10 and 12 points to the songs, is one of the most beloved aspects of the broadcast.
As an event, Eurovision is hard-selling European Idol, but in truth, it does give Brownlow Medal vibes.
Once the professional jury scores are on the leaderboard, the television audience “tele-voting” is applied in a series of blocks, each one effectively re-ordering the scores, resulting in a build-to-a-climax finish that is often peppered with shocks and twists.
The 2026 Eurovision competition featured artists and songs from 35 countries performing in 20 languages.
SBS will replay the Eurovision grand final tonight at 7.30pm AEST. Both semi-finals and the grand final are available via SBS on Demand.
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