Another day, another NF surprise, lol. My opinions aren't as strong as some others here - I neither loved nor hated Bashar - but I do think he had the better song and performance than Hera.
Bashar would've been a low 7 or something for me - i.e. a touch above average - with the drawback of then facing two and a half months of angry "Eurovision is/isn't political," "will Iceland win with a song that isn't winner quality and what should we think about that" discourse in the fandom and broader media. Hera likely avoids that, but her song is kind of just a pile of nothing. Inoffensive, vaguely pleasant nothing, but nothing nonetheless. It's serving "we've got Embers at home" energy, and I'm not really sure you want to come across as a cheap knockoff of a song that came dead-last three years ago. Plus, this is coming from someone who absolutely loved her 2010 entry, and still listens to it regularly. This one, though...
points.
---Warning: the following devolves into a rant against superfinals at national selections.---
As far as the NF voting goes... yeah, this is probably another entry into my endless #bansuperfinals campaign. Or, rather, superfinals with four or more songs are fine, but when you go down to three - or especially two, as is the case here - you just open up a whole can of anti-voting worms.
Sure, there would've been people still voting for their favourite song, but any time you narrow things down to two choices, one of which is controversial, you're practically
begging its detractors to vote against it, as opposed to people just voting for what they like. It gets you compromise winners that minimise unhappiness, as opposed to maximising the number of people who actually love the song. That might be a perfectly good reason to use those kinds of runoff voting systems in, say, political elections, but at Eurovision... Well, a contest full of "broadly acceptable compromise winners" wouldn't exactly be exciting.
It's the same system that two years ago saw the risky Turn This Around, which was winning in the initial Songvakeppnin 2022 vote, lose to the much more broadly agreeable Með hækkandi sól in the superfinal. And with Bashar, of course, those anti-votes aren't just about the song but also, potentially, from people who want to avoid sending a politically charged entry, or avoid sending a pro-Palestine entry specifically, or avoid sending a Palestinian in general, or anyone not of Icelandic birth / long-term Icelandic residence...
Which ironically, I think, could make choosing Hera political itself. Even if her
song isn't, her becoming a proxy vote for "we don't want the Palestinian guy representing us," or for "we'd rather stay out of the whole dispute," could sort of
make the choice of Hera political.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong here; if Hera was leading Bashar in the first round of voting, and/or she beat him in the semifinal, you can't exactly say that she only won because of the superfinal and/or anti-voting. Maybe Icelandic voters just had odd taste this year? It's certainly not impossible, given what we've seen from a bunch of the other NFs this season. And I
did see some talk around over the past week that Hera's Icelandic social media stats (e.g. on the Songvakeppnin Facebook page or something) were actually stronger than Bashar's during/after the semifinal. Still - I'll be very interested to see the full results, whenever they're released.