ESC 2016: THE TINIEST CHALLENGES THE BIG ONES. SAN MARINO IS NOT AMUSED

When Swed... sorry, EBU announced there will be a change in the way of presenting the votes from now on this blogger was quite pleased or at least positively curious about the change. Until I read further and came to the point where the newsletter explained how a country woud provide the televote scores should they be unable to deliver it - like every year San Marino due to the fact most everyone in the tiny Republic uses Italian phone companies. Solution?

“A substitute result is calculated by the audience result of a pre-selected group of countries. These groups and their composition have been pre-approved by the EBU and the Reference Group".

What? Wait? Not really a celebration of democracy and transparency, is it? So San Marino's televotes will be basicly randomly calculated by who knows what criteria and delivered as the Sammarinese televotes..... So, San Marino's votes are only 50% Sammarinese compared to the other countries. Not sounding very fair, is it? Would someone exlain what that means really? Has every country a group of countries their score is calculated should they fail? Like if Finland failed with televotes, that would be summed up by Estonian, Swedish, Latvian, Norwegian voting combination? Or what? If Macedonia fails is it a mix of other ex-Yogoslavian countries? Or what? No wonder today SMRTV has reacted in the first persona of Carlo Romeo himself:

”Small States are, once again, discriminated. Not only, now the discrimination is even formalized. This is barely tolerable and the San Marino national Radio and Television is unsure whether it can tolerate it next year too. It is unbearable that certain decisions are simply communicated and not shared with the involved broadcasters. That said, this is, from our point of view, unacceptable”.

And not only to the fact pointed out above but to the fact they were not informed nor asked their opinion beforehand. One can read between the lines the threat of withdraw from 2017 contest if this remains the same.

It's also worth remembering if this voting system was valid already in 2014 San Marino would have failed to qualify to the final that year, so far the one and only time. But that's pure speculation. The rules and voting was what it was back then, and this is now.

Let's see how this developes and finally someone has the courage to voice their opinion. Even if it's the tiniest of them all.

COME TOGETHER..... not

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