As we know, the referee in Sanremo is always cheated. On Friday night, when Geolier won the cover night, they gave him a sellout, the referee, not the rapper, for not calling a foul, which, metaphorically speaking, is equivalent to a surplus of votes in favor of the medley with: Guè, Luchè, D'Ale. The racist addendum: They bought those votes. On Saturday night, the referee was betrayed for the diametrically opposite reason: he allowed Angelina Mango to snatch the victory from Geolier, the one most loved by the two in real land – it's clear that by now the songs' fans have figured that out The rapper's most listened to album of 2023 was.
It happens all the time. Get any combination of the audience at home, the press room, the radio, the opinion poll jury, the quality jury and the orchestra members to express their preference for the festival's songs and from the stands they will scream and whistle and make gesture of the horns. The mother of those who are not deceived by the system is always pregnant.
This shouting, charged with a mixture of racism and populism and the desire to express oneself immediately and loudly, gave the impression that the jury in the press room had overturned the verdict made by televoting. It's something you find written everywhere. It is conceptually and substantively a wrong idea.
This is conceptually wrong, because the final result is the result of the vote of three different juries that compete with more or less equal weight to determine the winner – in the case of Sanremo 2024, if you think of the five-way final, the televoting at 34%, the press room, TV and web at 33% and the radio jury at 33%. There is no jury that is less qualified than another or less important than another. And as a result, there can be no reversal, a concept based on the false assumption that the voting public is more important than the other two juries. Whether we like it or not, all three have the same dignity, which is enshrined in the regulation. To say that the jury in the press room overturned the verdict of the sovereign public is equivalent to saying that in the last political elections the voters of northern Italy overturned the verdict of the voters of southern Italy, or that those over 60 overturned the vote of the voters below 30. An absurdity.
The figures published by RAI at the end of the festival show that the idea is actually wrong – I am basing this solely on these, not on direct experience in the press room (I was not there), nor on rumors and gossip. Behind the idea of a U-turn is the suspicion that the jury from press, TV and web radically changed their voting orientation in the five-way final to favor Angelina Mango against Geolier, who, as is well known, achieved incredible numbers with televoting. That's not how it happened. At the end of Tuesday evening 6, the first in which all 30 singers performed with the competing pieces and the only one in which only the press, television and the Internet voted, Angelina Mango was in second place behind Loredana Bertè . Geolier was behind in 23rd place. Whether right or wrong, from the beginning the rapper was among the least chosen by journalists because they didn't appreciate him or didn't know him well enough.
The press room voted again Friday on the cover night won by Geolier. Unlike the televoting, in which the rapper received 43.3% of the votes, the journalists placed Geolier in 28th place, ahead only of La Sad and Sangiovanni. In the final five-way vote, in which the rapper received a record 60% of votes from his homeland, the press was consistent, placing him in fourth place, ahead of Irama but behind (in order) Angelina Mango, Annalisa and Ghali. The press room can be blamed for underestimating Geolier, not for being inconsistent (as far as possible and correct) in voting.
The third jury was the one that voted even less for Geolier, the one of the radio stations that replaced the opinion poll this year and which for some reason is rarely quoted, perhaps because it is not an easy target like the press. The radio jury voted for Geolier on Wednesday and Friday, placing him eighth (out of 15) and 26 (out of 30), respectively. In Saturday's five-man final, he placed Geolier in fifth place (the press's fourth place) and Angelina Mango in first place (the same as the press's).
Two out of three juries preferred Angelina Mango to Geolier right from the start. It wasn't the press that ruined the result. It was a phenomenal televote that pushed Geolier into second place. The referee may have been cheated, but the foul wasn't there.
