At Monday’s Eurovision Song Contest, Turkey’s president made derogatory comments about the contest’s yearly promotion of gender neutrality.
A statement delivered by Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a Cabinet meeting characterized contestants as Trojan Horses of the socially corrupt. Erdogan defended his government’s decision to exclude Turkey from the pan-European music competition since 2012. An apparent allusion to Swiss singer Nemo was made since she just received the 68th Eurovision Contest win with her operatic pop-rap hymn to embracing a nongender identity.
According to Erdogan, who heads Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party, it is now hard to encounter a normal person at these kinds of gatherings. The JDP originated from the Islamic movement in Turkey.
Erdogan said they were correct to exclude Turkey from this shameful competition for the last twelve years. In the same statement, Erdogan condemned Turkey’s drop in birth rates, calling them a national catastrophe and an existential danger.
The State Statistical Institute of Turkey reported this month that the birth rate in 2023 was 1.51 children per woman, a decrease from the previous year. Turkey’s leader has long advocated for a minimum family size of three children.
Once again, thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators flocked to the streets of cosmopolitan Malmö, Sweden, to oppose Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Police in Malmö, Sweden, have estimated that thousands of anti-Israel protesters converged in the city center to call for the elimination of Israeli Eurovision candidate Eden Golan.
Shin Bet, Israel’s top security agency, has been keeping Golan, who is representing her country with the song Hurricane (originally titled October Rain to honor the Hamas terror victims), primarily confined to her hotel room during the competition out of security concerns.
Despite being informed by organizers that politics should not be a factor in the voting process, 24-year-old pop singer Daniel Owen of Olso, Norway, who was chosen to serve on Norway’s Eurovision jury by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), confessed on social media that he was unable to vote for Israel’s Eden Golan on Saturday due to his views on the Gaza conflict.
