Romania Says Eurovision Organizers Changed Its Points, Giving Highest Score to Ukraine

The Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision 2022, which ended on Sunday night in Turin. Ukraine received 631 points from audience voting and the jury, taking the first place by a large margin from Great Britain in second with 466 points.

The European Broadcasting Union assigned a different set of scores than the one given by the Romanian jury members to the Eurovision participants, giving the highest score to Ukraine instead of Moldova, according to a statement from Romanian Broadcaster TVR.

EBU was said to have removed the jury of six countries from the competition before the announcement of the vote, citing an “incorrect voting scheme,” but did not name the countries. When it was time to announce the scores of the Romanian jury, the representative of the country, Eda Marcus, did not appear on the broadcast.

“We were surprised to discover that the result of the Romanian jury’s vote was not taken into account in the calculation of the final ranking. The organizers assigned a different set of points to the participants of the final, on behalf of the jury of our country. We specify that the Romanian jury decided to give maximum score to the representatives of Moldova,” the broadcaster said.

It stressed that neither the jury nor TVR representatives were notified after the second semi-final of the existence of any suspicions about the Romanian vote, which indicates the rules were changed during the competition, “without the participants being notified in advance.”

The changes left Moldova without any points from Romania. TVR asked the ESC organizers to provide “clear reasons why they replaced the jury score in Romania with a ‘substitute’ calculated in a non-transparent way.”