Eric Saade, Sweden’s representative in Eurovision 2011, has become one of the main protagonists of the first semi-final of the contest, held this Tuesday. The singer was one of the invited artists and did not hesitate to claim his Palestinian origin by wearing a traditional kufiya on his arm. Now, Saade has responded to the reviews received by the festival organization, accusing the European Broadcasting Union of racism.
After the guest artist’s show at the opening After the gala, a spokeswoman for Swedish public television SVT criticized the singer’s protest gesture. Ebba Adielsson, who is also executive producer of Eurovision 2024, has accused the young man of breaking the rules of the contest and describes him as “sad that his participation explodes on stage like this.”
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Subsequently, Eric Saade published a statement on his Instagram profile responding to the words of the Swedish board. “My father gave me that shawl when I was little, so that he would never forget where the family comes from. Then I didn’t know that one day it would end up being a ‘political symbol,'” lamented the former Swedish flag bearer, who defends that it would be like “considering the Dalahäst (traditional wooden statuette in the shape of a horse) a political symbol.”
“In my opinion, that is simply racism. I just wanted to be inclusive and wear something authentic to me, but the EBU seems to find my ethnicity controversial. “It doesn’t say anything about me, but it says everything about them,” adds Saade, who ends his message with a new attack on the institution organizing the contest: “I stick to this year’s Eurovision slogan: ‘United by music’.”
Eric Saade has not been the only one who has pointed out the EBU for its attitude towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The representative of Ireland in this edition, Bambie Thugrevealed in the press conference after the semifinal that the organization had forced her to delete the messages she had written on her body in support of Palestine.
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During rehearsals, Thug had three sentences written in an ancient Celtic language called Ogham. Specifically, the messages translated into Spanish said “Stop the fire“, “free palestine” and the motto of their proposal, ‘crown the witch’. However, in the live gala the two references to the conflict in the Middle East were deleted.
After a journalist’s question about the phrases missing from her body, the representative was blunt: “I am a person in favor of freedom and justice, but unfortunately I had to change those messages today, leaving only ‘crown the witch’ by order of the EBU,” he said, prompting applause in the room.
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