The ABBA illusion: Has Eurovision been living off a miracle for 50 years?

Bulgaria took the trophy. ABBA took the credit. They always do.

Image: Eurovision website

The story is told so often it has acquired the quality of scripture. Brighton, 1974. Four Swedes in extraordinary costumes. A song called Waterloo. The moment, as the book 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest put it, that delivered “the biggest jolt” to Eurovision since its modest inception.

What followed — 380 million records sold, a West End musical, a global film franchise, a 2021 reunion album that debuted to worldwide fanfare — is one of the most extraordinary trajectories in the history of popular music.

And Eurovision has been dining out on it ever since.

On Saturday night, at Vienna’s Wiener Stadthalle, in front of 10,000 spectators and a television audience in excess of 100 million, Bulgaria’s Dara won the 70th Eurovision Song Contest with Bangaranga — a pulsating party anthem that its 27-year-old performer described as “pop music with folklore bones”. Her performance came with whiplash-inducing choreography, based on the ancient Bulgarian tradition of Kukeri, in which masked performers chase away evil spirits.

After her win, Dara told reporters Bangaranga was “this inner feeling that everything is going to be all right and that everything is possible”. The opening lyrics of the second stanza offer their own declaration:

“I’m an angel, I’m a demon, I’m a psycho for no reason.”

It is, by any measure, a genuinely interesting Eurovision winner. Bulgaria’s first in the contest’s 70-year history, achieved by a country that only joined in 2005 and sat out the last three editions entirely. A song rooted in thousands of years of Balkan tradition, reimagined as floor-filling pop.

A victory that, not incidentally, spared the EBU the considerable headache of staging next year’s contest in Tel Aviv. Noam Bettan’s second-place finish — a romantic pop song about a toxic relationship that drew a warmer reception than Israel’s 2025 entry — was still met with booing when the public vote was announced.

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The precise meaning of “bangaranga” became one of the running jokes of the evening. The contest’s ability to generate that kind of collective, continent-wide moment of shared bewilderment and delight remains one of its genuinely irreplaceable qualities. Nobody does this quite like Eurovision.

But the ABBA question persists: Has Eurovision been living off a miracle for 50 years?

The miracle, examined

ABBA did not just win Eurovision. They used it as a launchpad for a career that reshaped music. Waterloo was the opening statement; what followed was a sustained creative achievement that transcended the contest entirely and has proved commercially indestructible across five decades. Their story is real, documented, and extraordinary.

The problem is not that ABBA won Eurovision. The problem is the conclusion the contest draws from it — that their triumph proves Eurovision is a legitimate musical platform capable of consistently identifying and elevating genuine talent. That conclusion requires scrutiny, because ABBA did not succeed because of Eurovision. They succeeded in spite of it, and largely independently of it.

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Eurovision was the door. They built everything else themselves. The contest takes credit for ABBA the way a doorman takes credit for a party.

More pointedly: in the 50 years since, has Eurovision produced anything remotely comparable?

The supporting evidence, honestly assessed

Eurovision’s defenders will cite Celine Dion, who won representing Switzerland in 1988 and went on to sell more than 200 million albums and record My Heart Will Go On. It is a genuinely compelling case — except that Dion won by a single point, had already released multiple French-language albums as a teenager, and built her international career through a decade of relentless work that had nothing to do with Eurovision. Again, the contest opened a door. Dion had the talent and the industry behind her to walk through it.

Loreen’s 2012 winner Euphoria reached №1 in 15 countries and stands as one of the finest pure pop songs the contest has produced. She returned to win again in 2023. Måneskin, who took the title for Italy in 2021, built a genuine international rock career on the back of their win — and their recently announced reunion suggests the story is far from over. These are real, documented success stories. But they are also vanishingly rare — the exceptions that prove the rule; modern winners whose music outlasted the contest weekend and entered the broader cultural conversation.

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For every Loreen, there are dozens of winners whose names require a Wikipedia search. For every Waterloo, there are contests whose winning songs have already been forgotten by the following Monday morning. The contest’s own fanbase, in its more honest moments, acknowledges this. Log into Reddit or Quora and go down the relevant rabbit hole, and you’ll find even devoted fans describing the songs as mediocre at best.

Does Bangaranga buck that trend? It might.

It has genuine energy, genuine cultural roots, and a performer with genuine charisma. Dara’s description of the song — coupled with the fact that the lyrics address her commitment to overcoming anxiety and ADHD, which she was diagnosed with last year — suggests an artist with something to say beyond the three-minute spectacle. Whether that translates into a sustained international career, or whether Bulgaria’s first Eurovision win becomes a cherished footnote rather than a launchpad, remains to be seen.

The contest’s recent history does not encourage optimism.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic

It remains instructive to hold Eurovision against the American talent competitions it is so often compared to, in terms of cultural scale and significance.

American Idol, since its 2002 debut, has produced Kelly Clarkson — 10 studio albums, three Grammys, and a long-running Emmy-winning talk show. It produced Carrie Underwood, who has accumulated eight Grammy Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and induction into the Grand Ole Opry. Fantasia Barrino earned a Golden Globe nomination in 2023. Scotty McCreery, dropped by his record label in 2016, rebuilt his career on his own terms, and was later inducted into the Grand Ole Opry by Garth Brooks.

These are not one-in-a-generation anomalies. They are a pattern.

The Voice operates on an even purer musical premise: blind auditions in which coaches with industry credibility select singers based solely on vocal merit, before they have even seen their faces. Danielle Bradbery, the season four winner, has accumulated more than 88 million streams on her most popular song — which is not from the show itself. Cassadee Pope reached №1 on the Top Country Albums chart. Brynn Cartelli, who won at 15, has a song called If I Could with more than 15 million streams.

The show creates conditions in which talent can actually develop, because its architecture is built around musical ability rather than national identity, political geography, or the preferences of government social media accounts.

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Eurovision is not designed to find musical talent. It is designed to produce a television event that happens to involve songs. Saturday night’s result was a reminder that those two things occasionally overlap in genuinely exciting ways. Bangaranga deserved its moment. But one good winner does not create a system.

Neither show is perfect. Far from it.

Both have produced cautionary tales alongside their success stories, but the structural difference is significant: Idol and The Voice are designed to find and develop musical talent on television. Eurovision is designed to be a television event that happens to involve songs. It’s not for nothing that the Eurovision Song Contest, to give it its full title, is known everywhere as simply Eurovision. It’s not an abbreviation, it’s an explanation. It’s a visual event.

The institutional crisis

Saturday’s contest took place against a backdrop of institutional disarray that the result did nothing to resolve. Five national broadcasters boycotted the event over Israel’s participation — the largest withdrawal in Eurovision’s 70-year history. Nemo, the Swiss singer who won the 2024 contest, returned their trophy in protest. About 2000 people demonstrated in Vienna’s city centre against Israel’s inclusion. The EBU spent the week before the final issuing formal warnings to the Israeli broadcaster for social media content, instructing supporters to vote the maximum allowable number of times.

Bulgaria’s victory spared everyone the most difficult conversation — what it would have meant logistically and politically for Israel to host the 2027 contest. But it did not resolve the underlying questions about voting integrity, institutional governance, or the EBU’s increasingly strained claim to be running an apolitical event. Those questions will return, as they always do, the moment the glitter settles.

The honest verdict

Bangaranga is a worthy winner. It is rooted in genuine tradition, delivered with genuine conviction, and represents a country — Bulgaria — that brought something authentically Bulgarian to the contest’s most celebrated stage. If any song from Vienna 2026 has the character to outlast the weekend, this is it.

But a single worthy winner does not resolve 50 years of accumulated questions about what Eurovision actually is and what it is actually for. ABBA was a miracle. Celine Dion was a miracle. Loreen was a miracle. Dara and Bangaranga may yet prove to be one too.

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Miracles, however, are not a system. And a competition that has spent half a century pointing to one extraordinary night in Brighton as proof of its musical legitimacy is a competition that has been asking one extraordinary anomaly to carry an enormous amount of weight.

Eurovision’s 70th year delivered sequins, pyrotechnics, political tension, a genuinely joyful winner, and the word “bangaranga” entering the European cultural vocabulary. What it did not deliver — what it has not delivered consistently in decades — is evidence that the contest reliably identifies and rewards musical talent above all else.

ABBA happened at Eurovision. They did not happen because of it. The distinction matters, and the contest’s unwillingness to reckon with it honestly is precisely why, 70 years in, it finds itself defending its relevance rather than celebrating it.

Until Eurovision builds the structures that consistently reward musical merit over political geography, it will remain what it has largely become: A magnificent, maddening, occasionally miraculous spectacle, haunted by the ghost of four Swedes in flared trousers who accidentally proved what the contest could be — and never quite managed to be again.