The participation of the Netherlands was finally decided outside the Eurovision 2024 final, as announced by EBU. THE Dutch artist Joost Klein was disqualified from the European song contest following a complaint made by a female member of the production crew, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) said in a statement.

Therefore, the final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest will now be held with 25 songs and without it “Europapa”which was one of the favorites of the evening.

The EBU has issued a new announcement with which he explains in detail how today’s voting will take place and what will be the order of appearance of the countries participating in the final.

So, according to the EBU, “all contestants retain their number on the official list for their order of appearance. There will be no song in position 5. The jury results, which were received after the dress rehearsal – on Friday 10 May – have been recalculated so that the Netherlands will not receive any points. For this reason, all members of the jury must rank all songs from 1 to 26.

Joost Klein, who represented the Netherlands

For example, if the Netherlands was ranked 9th by a national jury in a country, the song that was ranked 10th is now ranked 9th and will receive 2 points, and the song that was ranked 11th is now 10th place and gets 1 point. No points will be given to the Netherlands by the public.

Viewers in the Netherlands can vote in the final and the result of the Dutch Jury still stands. In case someone tries to vote for song 5 (where the Netherlands was), their votes will not count, but there is a possibility that viewers will be charged. The Netherlands will not appear in the scoreboard.” noted in the announcement.

“Shocking decision”

The first reaction to the exclusion of Joost Klein from the Eurovision final, according to Agence France-Presse, came from the television station Avrotros, which hosts the contest in the Netherlands, as it considers the exclusion of the Dutch artist “disproportionate”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Eurovisie Songfestival (@songfestival.avrotros)

The channel said in a press release sent to AFP that it found the ban “disproportionate”, saying the “decision is shocking”.

“We are deeply sorry and will come back to this later”adds the TV station which is part of the Dutch public broadcasting system.