Still don't get it. Not sure if it's the Portuguese language (I've always thought it's a bit hit and miss in songs, doesn't sound as pretty as Spanish to my ears), or maybe it's Salvador's odd gestures as he sings...
I dunno, this song just kind of does nothing for me at all. I'm clearly not its main market though, so my opinion here probably doesn't count for much, but rest assured there will be plenty of people switching off after less than a minute of this and heading for the kettle/toilet/biscuit tin/pizza box.
Not liking the song is perfectly fine - even as a fan of it, I can see how it'd be rather divisive, and I was on the fence for a while myself. But if anything, I'd say polarising opinion tends to be more of a positive than a negative, especially within the Eurovision voting system.
Now, if we assume that someone's rankings in the 12-1 system roughly correspond with their likelihood of voting for a song, we can imagine a scenario of 10 voters where: Portugal is #1 (12P) with 50% of people, and dead last (0P) with the other 50%. Meanwhile, some middle-of-the-road song - let's say Australia - comes 10th (1P) for 100% of people. The end result here is that Portugal sits on 60 points, while Australia is on 10 points, because Portugal instils a more extreme emotional reaction one way or another despite sitting lower on a mean average of people's preferences.
If you think about it, it seems likely that this kind of scenario has been the case with some previous winners. Most notably, Finland 2006, Austria 2014, and Ukraine 2016 were in no way songs that everyone liked; compared to some of the other big favourites, they had smaller fanbases, and a lot of people that hated them. But those who liked their performances
really liked them, which meant that a lot of their fans were impressed enough to pick up the phone and vote, as opposed to fans of some other stuff who went 'yeah, this is good, but not enough for me to spam votes for it'.
I'm not saying that's guaranteed to happen this year - I still think Italy has the best shot at winning by far - but Portugal is a real threat, and along similar lines, perhaps Armenia as well.
1
