According to RTL Boulevard, the choice to send Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper to the Eurovision Song Contest is extremely suspicious. However, AvroTros bobo Frits Huffnagel speaks of a conspiracy theory.
The AvroTros announced yesterday who will be allowed to sing on behalf of our country in the Eurovision Song Contest next year: the unknown occasional duo Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper. These turn out to be friends of Eurovision winner Duncan Laurence and his boyfriend Jordan Garfield. So Friendship Policy.
Complete farce?
However, according to RTL Boulevard, it goes much further than that and the entire selection procedure is a big farce. Mia posted the following on Instagram on May 18: “I’ll say it already: in six months a new project that I love will come out into the world. It’s going to blow things up a lot.”
Yesterday it became clear. Then Mia posted: “Remember when I said something big was coming in November? Well, it’s there. Eurovision Song Contest 2023, we are coming.”
cheating
Huh, but the entire selection procedure for the Song Contest only started on May 16, didn’t it? Have artists and song makers with Eurovision ambitions been putting themselves out there for months for nothing?
The AvroTros responds: “Six months ago she posted that she wanted to release new music in November. But in the end she manifested something even better: the Eurovision Song Contest. That new music will of course be shifted.”
But Mia says clearly in her post that she meant the Eurovision revelation with her statement? That is according to AvroTros ‘her humor’. Boulevard: “What exactly is funny about it is unknown to us.”
Aran critical
RTL Boulevard reporter Aran Bade thinks it is very strange and not nice to other entries. “What happened to those people and to all those songs that came in? Has that been listened to at all?”
At the very least it tends to favoritism, he thinks. “May 16 that selection committee started and May 18 she posted this. Could it be that AvroTros already got the number from Duncan Laurence and then said: ‘Guys, it’s you, but keep it quiet until November’?”
conspiracy theory
Frits Huffnagel, who is on the board of trustees at the AvroTros, portrays Aran and his colleagues at Boulevard as conspiracy wappies. “Mia posted a post, but I think it had more to do with the album she was working on,” he says in Shownieuws.
He continues: “But as it should be these days: everything is a conspiracy theory. Everyone is looking for something behind everything and so it is now placed in that context.”
Deathly ill
Shownieuws colleague Ronald Molendijk thinks it is shameful that the choice smacks of favoritism. “Duncan says he called the entire committee flat and they were mad at him. (…) Today I really heard from several people who also pitched a song… They are really sick of this. This is really not right.”
Tooske Ragas: “In any case, the procedure seems against it.”
Frits: “Duncan simply has an entrance. Why not listen to the one who won the Eurovision Song Contest? If the committee had not thought it was good enough, they would have chosen something else.”
Tooske: “Why don’t they adopt a two-track policy? That they first look within their own club and if that doesn’t work, they open it up to the rest of the Netherlands. Then you at least have the feeling that you have a chance.”
