I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.

Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.

Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.

Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”

To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.

Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.

It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.

Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.

To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.

There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-meter tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.

These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.

“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasizes he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.

Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologize, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.

Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.

Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasizes he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavor for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”

Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.

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In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”

And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.

Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.

Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honoring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centers for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.

But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbor, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.

It is difficult to imagine a coherent argument against it on cultural grounds: after all, one of the arguments Israel’s supporters currently find most objectionable is that Israelis (most of whom are now descended from Middle Eastern Jewish refugees) “really” belong in Europe. In fact, the question is not technically a cultural one: as Palestine is not a member of the European Broadcasting Union, it is not eligible to join. Yet all the other Arab states neighbouring Europe are EBU members, and free to take part if they wish to: Morocco’s 1980 entry was — so far — the only Eurovision entry to be performed in Arabic, while Lebanon only withdrew its planned 2005 entry once the state broadcaster realised it would not be permitted to censor Israel’s performance. But that the question immediately asserts itself as a cultural one — a drawing of borders between our European home, and outsiders — reaches to the very heart of the contest’s meaning.

The Eurovision Song Contest, after all, was first performed in neutral Switzerland just 11 years after its contestants had finished ripping the continent apart in a war from which it has never recovered. Indeed, the first Eurovision took place a year before the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Community. Explicitly intended as a means to unite a shattered Europe in a continent-spanning shared cultural event, it is directly analogous to Nasser’s contemporaneous use of the new transistor radio and popular music to inculcate a shared sense of national identity across the Arab world. The Eurovision Song Contest, in its construction and reification of a shared European cultural space, is, like the growth of print media in the New World which underlay Benedict Anderson’s influential (and widely misunderstood) thesis on the origins of nationalism, a European “imagined community”. That it is tasteless kitsch is not an argument against this interpretation: all nationalism is kitsch to various degrees, more apparent to the external observer than to the dewy-eyed devotee.

It is a commonly held truism that Eurovision’s point-awarding mechanism owes as much to ethnic and political rivalries and solidarities as it does the quality of the songs themselves: Britain’s infamous 2003 nul points was widely, and perhaps correctly, interpreted as a reaction to the Iraq War, while Ukraine’s 2022 victory — with its on-stage shout-out to the defenders of Azovstal — hardly derived from its musical quality alone. When Britain hosted the 2023 contest on Ukraine’s behalf, it was a diplomatic message from the top about our nation’s commitment to the Ukraine War.

Equally, when Spain chose to enter an Argentine tango for the 1982 contest, held in Britain at the height of the Falklands War, it was a campy diplomatic snub. Eurovision and Europe’s volatile politics are deeply intertwined: Portugal’s 1974 performance was the signal for the military coup sparking the Carnation Revolution against its Catholic-authoritarian Estado Novo government, while the ageing Franco is alleged to have bribed the judges of the 1968 contest to win Spain glory and lessen the isolation of his regime. Israel’s 2000 entry — which came at a time when Israeli liberals hoped Bashar al-Assad’s assumption of power in Syria might lead to peace between the two countries — featured the performers wearing Arab keffiyehs and singing about their lover in Damascus, and waving Syrian flags on stage. The Israeli government withdrew all support for the entry, which flopped: when they flew back to Israel, the singer was spat on at Ben-Gurion airport.

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That Britain, on the whole, does not take the contest seriously may tell us more about Britain’s attitude to Europe than it does the contest. Academics of nationalism and cultural identity have increasingly begun to focus on Eurovision as an object of detailed study, while it is in Europe’s east and south-east — the New Europe that has shifted the Union’s centre of political gravity eastward and, unintentionally, towards confrontation with Russia — that themes of culture and identity have come to predominate.

Consider the case of Yugoslavia, whose Eurovision history prefigured its collapse and reconfiguration into a cluster of stable ethnostates and unstable multiethnic protectorates. An early Eurovision participant — a means to symbolise Tito’s distance from the Eastern Bloc and openness towards the West — the former Yugoslavia came to rely on Croatian songwriters for its winning entries: the music of the former Habsburg lands was seen as more acceptably European than the exotic-sounding Balkan melodies of formerly Ottoman-ruled Serbia. When Yugoslavia hosted the contest in 1990 in Croatia’s Zagreb, the TV host announced to the world that, like an orchestra, the country was made up of many different parts which came together in a harmonious whole. Yet Yugoslavia’s diversity was not, in the end, its strength: neither Croatia nor Slovenia, Bosnia nor the Kosovars would send forward a contestant to the Belgrade heats the following year, as Yugoslavia collapsed into bloody civil war.

Indeed, Serbia’s triumphantly folkish 2010 entry “This is the Balkans” can be seen as a marker of cultural self-confidence following its decade-long ejection from the contest over the course of the Yugoslav Wars: expelled from Eurovision, Serbia had been cast out of the European family. Meanwhile, Bosnia’s almost inaudibly faint 1993 voting panel, dialling in from besieged Sarajevo, was given a round of applause: Bosnia’s struggle to appear at Eurovision was seen to presage its eventual journey towards the EU, of which it is now a poor and unstable protectorate. When Estonia, whose nationalist independence movement against the USSR was, after all, The Singing Revolution, won the contest in 2001, its Prime Minister Matt Laar declared that “now we are not knocking on the door of Europe but will simply walk in singing”.

Is it fanciful, then, to imagine we can trace countries’ cultural shifts through their Eurovision entries? The year before it joined the EU, Poland’s 2003 representative sang in German and Russian that he desired no borders, a remarkable cosmopolitan aspiration given the country’s history. Does this mean Poland’s 2014 entry “We are Slavic”, in which buxom peasants in folk dress danced a polka while praising their “hot Slavic blood”, a reflection of the country’s subsequent drift towards traditionalist national conservatism?

The question is not as fanciful as it sounds. The eastward expansion of the contest, like that of the European Union, has brought on stage folkish and politically charged cultural undercurrents absent from the days of interchangeable Western European pop, in a process the Swedish academic Alf Björnberg has dubbed Eurovision’s “return to ethnicity”. Just as Turkey learned that the sinuously exotic Orientalism of its winning 2003 entry — the lyrics of which more or less openly express frustration with its tortuous EU accession negotiations — presented an attractive synthesis of its Eastern heritage and then-presumed European future, so have other tenuously Western countries adopted völkisch stylings in presenting themselves to European audiences.

Greece’s winning 2005 Eurovision entry fused the country’s deeply Oriental pop music tradition with an interlude of high-camp Cretan lyre playing, a nod to the highland peasant culture underlying modern Greek national identity. With its national inferiority-cum-superiority complex towards Western Europe uneasily balanced with its Balkan peasant traditions, Greece, more than most countries, plays with these themes at Eurovision. This year’s Greek entry makes the implicit explicit, as the Sudanese-Greek singer Marina Satti presents herself as a tour guide taking a Westerner around kitsch-laden Athenian tourist traps, while also dancing in folk style to the shrill Balkan melodies of the northern Greek klarina. European and not, Western and not, this year’s entry performs in high camp the national identity crisis Patrick Leigh-Fermor expertly outlined as the “Helleno-Romaic Dilemma”.

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An early adopter of the contest’s shift towards ethnicity, Ukraine’s more tragic division between East and West is dramatically displayed in its Eurovision entries. 2004’s winning “Wild Dances” purported to represent the folk traditions of the Hutzul highlanders of Ukraine’s far western Carpathian Mountains, a symbolic repository of ür-Ukrainianness from which wartime popular-nationalist motifs are still drawn, just as its 2021 and winning 2022 entries consciously utilised folk motifs, reflective of an ongoing  process of nationalist state formation.

But the country’s tormented relationship with Russia, the Other against which Ukraine is defined, has also been overtly referenced at Eurovision: its entry for the 2005 contest, held in Kyiv, was an adaptation of a protest song from the just-concluded Orange Revolution, the original nationalist and anti-Russian lyrics of which were bowdlerised to fit Eurovision rules. Eurovision tries to maintain an apolitical stance — after the 2014 audience booed Russia’s panel, the following year organisers covered the noise with taped applause — yet it is impossible to disentangle the show from the bloodier contest now reshaping Europe. Ukraine’s winning 2016 entry, following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, a ballad purportedly about Stalin’s 1944 expulsion of the Crimean Tatars, was as charged a political comment as the contest permits, to Russian dissatisfaction.

It does not take a great deal of symbolic imagination to read Georgia’s 2009 submission, “We Don’t Wanna Put In” as a response to Putin’s invasion of the country the previous year: as the lyrics protested, his “negative mood” was “killing the groove” for the country’s Western aspirations (Eurovision eventually banned the entry). Yet Putin’s Russia is far from averse to making political statements in its own Eurovision entries — as a number of analysts have observed, the Kremlin has long used Eurovision as a showcase of its geopolitical messaging, with Putin declaring Russia’s 2008 win as “not only a personal success for Dima Bilan, but one more triumph for all of Russia”.

Indeed, it is not difficult to trace Russia’s changing attitude to the West in its contest submissions. It is fascinating to reflect, when considering the Kremlin’s current attitude to questions of gender and sexuality, that in 2003 a West-leaning Russia entered the faux-lesbian band t.A.T.u as its entry, with Russian commentators laughing off the fact that its sexualised performances were banned on Top of the Pops and CD:UK as po-faced Western puritanism.

Today, we can say the poles have been reversed: it is the West that leans into displays of homoerotic sexuality, while t.A.T.u’s singer Yulia Volkova stood as a candidate for Putin’s United Russia party. Indeed, analysts have taken Russian state media’s highly negative reaction to the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst’s 2015 victory — the year following Russia’s criminalisation of “homosexual propaganda” — as a significant turning point in the Kremlin’s conservative turn. As the serious EU analysis paper Strategic Communications from the East observes: “Moscow, supported by state media outlets such as Ria Novosti and RT, used the triumph of the transgender candidate as an opportunity to emphasise Russia’s moral superiority over the West,” accentuating a cultural and geopolitical pivot leading us to the war in Ukraine.

Similarly, Russia’s use of non-ethnic-Russian singers like the Ukrainian singer Anastasiia Prikhoďko, who performed in a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, has been theorised as Moscow’s display of a nostalgic pan-Soviet solidarity encompassing countries which may themselves prefer to evade Moscow’s bearhug. Similarly, choices like its 2012 entry of ethnic Udmurt babushkas from the depths of the Urals baking bread and dancing in traditional folk dress express not only an increasingly-inward-looking cultural conservatism, but also an outward-facing performance of Russia as a harmoniously multi-ethnic empire, which as the academic Emily D. Johnson notes, “like classic Soviet internationalist propaganda, cast Russia as potentially more committed to diversity, tolerance, cooperation, and peace than key geopolitical opponents”.

Yet “perhaps, given the potential alternatives,” Johnson remarks, “we should feel grateful when Russia chooses to employ the nostalgic vocabulary of Soviet-style multiculturalism in staging itself for Eurovision. There are certainly scarier alternatives.” What are we to make, after all, of the fact that Russia’s last entry before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, “Russian Woman”, though outwardly an expression of formulaic feminist messaging, featured a stirringly anthemic bridge where the screen displayed a mournful Mother Russia watching over clashing armies as the stage erupted into jets of flame? At the song’s conclusion, the Tajik singer Manizha exhorted the audience, “Are you ready for change? Because we are — we are the change!” Europe was not, as we have learned, ready for the change that Moscow was planning.

Just as Russia’s enforced absence from the contest since the invasion — an exclusion not imposed after the 2014 conflict — dramatically symbolises the revisionist giant’s expulsion from the European family, so does the ongoing conflict over Israel’s inclusion this year symbolise dramatically shifting European attitudes to the country’s moral values. As the introduction to the 2007 collection of essays on Eurovision, A Song for Europe, observes, “Modernity characterises the ideal of post-war Europe to which the Eurovision Song Contest provides literal and figurative access: a society that is democratic, capitalist, peace-loving, multicultural, sexually liberated and technologically advanced.”

As we have seen, however, it also highlights the precise opposite, as the contest, like the continent’s politics, has been drawn eastward, embedding the stagey kitsch in a world of geopolitical rivalry, a disengagement from cosmopolitan internationalism and a return to traditional values, in which expansively imperial and ethnic particularist understandings of national selfhood have battled to assert themselves, consciously or otherwise, to the flag-waving crowds. The battle over Israel’s participation is then, less a breach of Eurovision’s stated values than the crystallisation of its actual ones. Like Saladin’s assessment of the meaning of Jerusalem at the end of Kingdom of Heaven, when we ask ourselves what Eurovision means, the answer is surely “Nothing… and everything”.

It’s the Eurovision Song Contest of course. And nowhere is it causing more upset than in Italy.

Soldi [Money], Italy’s entry song, is among the favourites to win this year’s festival of camp. It’s an irresistibly catchy tune by singer-songwriter Mahmood; it was number one in Italy for six weeks. Even now, it’s in the top 10 of the singles charts. The official Italian YouTube upload of the video has passed 80 million views, with remixes featuring well-known DJs; it’s been streamed more on Spotify than any other Italian debut.

But not everyone’s singing along. In fact, Mahmood has been the subject of much political controversy. In Italy, His selection has highlighted the political divisions between a perceived out-of-touch elite and the majority who voted to oust traditional parties at elections last year, ushering in a populist coalition of the far-Right League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement. In its inimitable way, Eurovision is foreshadowing real life and setting the stage for the other European electoral competition happening next week – between those who support the strengthening of the EU project and those who prioritise nationalism.

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Though he was born in Italy to an Egyptian immigrant father and Italian mother, Mahmood’s identity as an Italian is being called into question. His entry has also been criticised for not being “Italian” enough. Indeed, it is influenced by traditional Middle Eastern music, using hand clapping and Arabic dialect, and draws on the cultures he grew up with, describing a father who “drinks champagne during Ramadan” and ultimately abandons the family.

Mahmood, according to one critic “is the symbol of total integration … He represents the younger generation that is outward looking”. But according to many other Italians, he should never have been picked in the first place. The choice of such a politically correct multi-cultural candidate was an obvious fix.

The fireworks began back in February, when he was selected as Italy’s entry for Eurovision. This momentous decision takes place at the Festival of Italian Song, commonly known as the San Remo contest. It is a national institution, dating back to 1951, and gets audiences of over 10 million, eclipsing talent shows such as X-Factor. It is beloved of those generations who are most likely to still be watching live television.

Perhaps reflecting the tastes of those viewers, the popular vote on the night went to the young artist Ultimo, who sang a more traditional Italian ballad. It came as some surprise, then, when Mahmood was chosen as the ultimate winner by a panel of judges. There was immediate outrage from the viewers. And then the politicians spotted an opportunity and weighed right in.

Deputy prime minister and leader of the Right-wing League Matteo Salvini was first with a tweet: “#Mahmood…………… meh………… The most beautiful Italian song?!?”

The singer, according to Salvini, had been “used” by the Left, who had exalted him “as the singer of the boat landings… This is a mirror of the country and the opposition between the people and the elite.”

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Luigi Di Maio – leader of anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the other deputy prime minister – joined in, calling for the judges’ vote to be scrapped in favour of a public vote “that counts”. Echoing Salvini, he said that the case “made millions of Italians aware of the abysmal distance between the people and the elite”.

While in other countries, such interest from political heavyweights in a song contest might be cause for head-scratching, the selection came at a critical political moment. The coalition was at risk of collapsing, as Five Star was polling its supporters over a decision to grant Salvini political immunity from prosecution over his detention of a migrant vessel Diciotti.

Five Star did ultimately support Salvini over the abuse of power charges, which allowed the government to endure. But in the run-up to the other European elections, the differences between the two governing parties are being stoked up. Five Star have sought to distance themselves from Salvini’s nationalist rhetoric and have forced the resignation of a senior League MP for alleged corruption.

Since the “government of change” was formed between the two populist parties last year, Salvini, who is in theory the junior partner, has become the most important politician in the country – and, arguably, in Europe. With his strong social media presence and knack for sound-bites, he has consistently set the political agenda; his popularity has been strengthened by his tough anti-immigration stance, blocking the ports and closing refugee shelters.

The vote next week will provide the first major European test for populist parties and immigration remains a top issue for Italian voters. “Immigration was not invented by Salvini, but it affects deep sections in Italian society and, in a time of economic crisis, immigrants are seen as a target,” says Alberto Castelvecchi, professor of political communications at Luiss University in Rome.

The League is projected to win more than 30% of the Europe vote, superseding Five Star, which won the larger vote share in last year’s general election. But Salvini’s party has slipped in the polls over the last few weeks, probably because of infighting, notes Antonio Noto of Noto Polls:

“Italians do not like political conflict, especially between the two governing forces. The voters expect to be reassured by the government, not worried by constant quarrels.”

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Much is riding on next week’s elections, though. If the League takes more of Italy’s 73 European Parliament seats than its rivals next week, it will be a turning point. It could tempt Salvini to force snap elections with the aim of forming a Right-wing coalition with the hard-Right Brothers of Italy and remainder of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party.

The ones listening to Mahmood –  the open, European-facing, pro-international cohort – the ones who could swing things in the other direction, are unlikely to turn out to vote. In any use, even if he wins tonight, it’s unlikely his victory would make a dent in the anti-European sentiment pervading Italy.

After all, as Mahmood is belting his tune out to the Eurovision audience in Tel Aviv, Salvini will be at home in Milan, playing a key part in a massive rally of Eurosceptics. Campaigning alongside Marine Le Pen and representatives of Germany’s far-Right AfD, he’ll aim to show that there is unity left in Europe – between those who put their own nations first.

As ever, Eurovision holds the mirror up to real life: during its 50 years of history, it’s always descended into strategic alliances in the national interest. And that’s what we can surely expect from Italy next week.