KIEV: Portugal’s Salvador Sobral won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday performing a jazz-style ballad written by his sister, taking the top spot for the first time in the country’s history and celebrating with a call to “put emotion back into music”.
Along with singers from Italy and Bulgaria, Sobral was a favourite going into the final of the annual songfest, which was hosted in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and he led the voting throughout the evening. Portugal finished ahead of Bulgaria and Moldova.
A soft-spoken, 27-year-old with a scraggly beard, Sobral won with “Amar Pelos Dois” (“Love For Both of Us”), sung in his native Portuguese. This is the first time Portugal won since it first entered the contest in 1964. After being announced as the winner, Sobral performed the ballad again, this time in duet with his sister Luisa.
“Music is not fireworks, music is feeling,” he said after winning. “Let’s put emotion back into music.”
Asked later at a press conference whether he was now a national hero, he said: “Honestly man I just want to live a peaceful life, if I thought of myself as a national hero it would be a bit weird, you know.”
Ukraine hosted the competition while it also fights a war, hundreds of kilometres (miles) away in the east, against Russian-backed separatists.
As is a custom in the contest, geopolitics played a part.
Russia boycotted this year’s event after Ukraine barred its contestant from entering the country – a symptom of the countries’ toxic relations since Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014. Ukraine won last year’s Eurovision with its Crimean Tatar entry Jamala.
In a grim reminder of the continued conflict in the east, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cancelled his scheduled appearance at the competition after four civilians were killed in artillery attacks that Kiev blamed on the separatist rebels. – Reuters
