It’s time to let people decide who will win the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).

This is a leader. The leader reveals the position of VG. VG’s political editor answers the leader.

One secret judge has together with the voice of the people can determine the outcome of the world’s largest competition in popular music.

This arrangement was supposed to end in Liverpool on Sunday evening.

Then the same thing happened with the Finnish participant Käärijä as with the Norwegian KEiiNO in 2019:

They won the people, but not the competition.

This can happen because a jury consisting of five people in each participating country decides the same amount about 160 million million TV viewers.

Thus Sweden’s Loreen climbed to the top again – although she did get the 12 points and top score from the popular vote in one country.

And Sweden will thus be able to host Eurovision in 2024 – 50 years after the legendary Abba broke through “Waterloo” in Brighton in 1974.

Not a bad word about Sweet brother or skilled artist with long fingernails.

Watch the winning moment here:

But the voting system that characterizes this competition in pop and stage shows violates the unwritten rules of popular music and a cherished democratic principle.

It’s people who decide how many pop songs get played – and thus score the highest in popularity.

Swedes in particular know this well beforehand – being the home country of the streaming service Spotify – (by the way, Norway’s Alessandra Mele with her song “Queen of the Kings” is the Queen of the hit songs among this year’s Eurovision artists.)

An artist has the most views of a song on the world’s largest streaming service for a year – yes, it was probably the most popular song in the world that year.

Of course there’s no additional jury deciding or looking at which songs or other artists are on this list.

See Finland’s contribution here:

There’s also something so popular and democratic in that most people in Brighton, Borås, and Berlevåg rarely find themselves in the same universe as the brains of musicologists who are perhaps too analyzing, to paraphrase VG’s own music reviewers’ analysis.

In the Eurovision Song Contest, all participating countries must participate on equal terms. It implies that votes are converted to scores from each participating country.

What’s new this year is that TV viewers from outside the participating countries can also vote – and be part of the “outside country” score in the tally.

Sweden, which is home to powerful ESC chair Martin Österdahl, won for the sixth time this year and will host next year. At the national Melodifestivalen, Swedes have implemented a separate voting system where the audience is divided into age categories to present a better picture of what people think of the songs in competition.

Perhaps Sweden can go down in history as the ESC host on Abba and Waterloo’s anniversary year – as well as being the first host nation to give all power to its people.

What if that doesn’t happen, and the European Broadcasting Union’s EBU has doubts about the jury system – which still has some support?

Then there has to be a minimum requirement of openness and transparency – and people finally get to see the jury’s face.

Now the judges are most reminiscent of the Norwegian duo Subwoolfer, who last year participated in the competition in 2022 wearing yellow wolf masks with the text “Give That Wolf A Banana”.

In this year’s semifinals, it was the people’s vote alone that sent the participating nations to the final of the Melody Grand Prix – as some nostalgic among us still call the competition. The natural continuation is to give all power to the people in 2024.