The Eurovision Song Contest will take place next year in Basel, a Swiss city bordering Germany and France, the organisers – the Swiss Broadcasting Organisation (SRG) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – decided on Friday.
The city, which competed with Geneva to host the popular song festival, participated under the motto ‘Overcoming Borders’. The city sees itself and the region as the best example of how borders can become irrelevant in people’s daily lives.
The German border region also wants to benefit from the popular singing competition: the mayor of the town of Lörrach, which is less than 10 kilometres from Basel, strongly advocated that this competition should be preferred over Geneva.
“We are turning the Eurovision Song Contest into a border area of three countries, a border area of forty countries,” said independent politician Jörg Lutz in Basel’s registration video.
He said that many Eurovision visitors could stay overnight in Lörrach.
In Basel, hotel prices for basic accommodations had already skyrocketed before the announcement, to several hundred euros per night.
