National pride is also at stake. While no one takes the competition overly seriously, no one wants their country to blow it, either. Notably, Jemini, Britain’s entry in 2003, returned home in disgrace after getting “null points.” At all. From anyone. (Equally true, though, is that no nation really wants to win, because winning means having to host the next year’s competition, which costs a small fortune.)

Yet the voting is highly political, with Byzantine backroom dealing and bloc voting that would make the International Olympic Committee blush. Of course, there’s never been any outright confirmation that countries band together to rig the results, but there have been well-established voting blocs for years, some intuitive (the former Soviet republics tend to vote together) and others less so (Malta often votes with England and Ireland). The picture is further complicated by the fact that fan votes are also counted: At present, there’s a 50/50 split between the weighting of fan votes, registered by phone, and those of the judges.

When it was founded in 1956, the contest was an exercise in transnational broadcasting, and if nothing else, the competition proves that Europe can still unite in appreciation of silly pop music. But on a divided Continent and in an age of growing Euro-skepticism, Eurovision stages an optimistically enlarged conception of what Europe is or might become: Contestants represent countries from as far afield as Morocco, Israel and even Azerbaijan.