Moldova’s audience chose Romania & Ukraine – the jury ignored both. The contradiction became a scandal and cost TRM boss Țurcanu his job.
Sometimes the ESC is just a song contest. In Moldova this week he clearly wasn’t. Because thanks to the ESC, Vlad Țurcanu, general director of the Moldovan state broadcaster TRM, announced his resignation at a press conference on May 18th. The reason: strong criticism of the country’s jury evaluation at the ESC final in Vienna. The Moldovan audience awarded twelve points to Romania and ten to Ukraine at ESC 2026. The official jury, however, chose Poland (12) and Israel (10). Three jury points remained for Romania. Not a single one for Ukraine.
More than musical taste: geopolitics in the voting room
One thing is clear: these points play no small role in Moldova. The country shares language, history and a border with Romania. It shares a large neighbor with Ukraine – and a concrete geopolitical fate since February 24, 2022. President Maia Sandu has condemned Russia’s war of aggression and announced that she will join the EU by 2030. In this coordinate system, Romania and Ukraine are not neutral neighboring countries, but political allies. The fact that the jury ignored both of them, while the audience looked in the same direction as the government, tipped the debate into politics. At the press conference, Țurcanu said the jury “did not take into account the sensitivities that exist between Moldova and our two neighbors.” And further: “Our attitude towards Ukraine is not zero points, and our feelings for Romania can only be love.” Nevertheless, he takes on the responsibility as head of the station – even if TRM has publicly distanced itself from the jury and emphasizes that their rating “does not represent the company’s position”.
This means that Germany can avoid the question of audience voting points. Because apparently our neighbors just don’t like us enough. Maybe an incentive to drink sangria from glasses instead of buckets in Mallorca and to stop cooking carbonara with cream. What Moldova implicitly admits here is that the quality of the song is partly secondary, nationality is crucial.
Jury versus audience – an old ESC question
Looking at the international jury ratings, it is also clear that Moldova was not the only outlier. Romania performed significantly worse with the juries than with the audience: a total of 64 jury points compared to 232 televote points – 13th place among the experts, 2nd place among the audience. The Moldovan jury was not the only oddball, but rather the sharpest tip of Europe-wide skepticism towards Alexandra Căpitănescu’s “Choke Me”.
The old ESC question remains, which comes up every year and is never answered: Who is actually right here – the seven experts or the millions who vote? There was an answer to this in Moldova in May 2026. Not in terms of content. But personnel.
