C'est le dernier: The Tied-and-Lost French Entry

MAY 15 1991 · 12:00

Amina · "C'est le dernier qui a parlé qui a raison" · France · 1991 Placement: 2nd · Score: 146 · Language: French · Composers: Wasis Diop, Amina Annabi · Venue: Studio 15 di Cinecittà · Host: Rome, Italy · Type: voting drama · Broadcast: color crt On May 4, 1991, at Cinecittà's Studio 15 in Rome — the Italian host venue hastily relocated from Sanremo after security concerns around the Gulf War — the Tunisian-French singer Amina Annabi performed 'C'est le dernier qui a parlé qui a raison' for France. The song, which she had co-written with the Senegalese composer Wasis Diop, was a slow-burning, North African-inflected piece that used a Tunisian proverb — 'it is the last who has spoken who is right' — as a meditation on the fragility of truth in a moment of war. The staging was restrained: Amina in a long dark dress, minimal orchestration, her voice carrying the song's weight alone. At the close of voting, France was tied with Sweden's Carola on 146 points. The 1991 tiebreak rules counted first the number of countries that had awarded each song twelve points, then ten points, and so on. France and Sweden were tied on twelves (four each). France lost the tiebreak at the ten-point count — Sweden had received more ten-point scores — and Carola's 'Fångad av en stormvind' was declared the winner. Amina had, by any reasonable interpretation, tied for first place and been defeated by a procedural rule most viewers had never heard of. Context Eurovision 1991 was widely reported as the most chaotic contest ever staged. Amina was a Tunisian-born French singer with a background in world-music and theatre; her Eurovision entry was an unusually artful composition for the contest. The Gulf War had ended only weeks before the contest. Legacy The France-Sweden tiebreak of 1991 forced Eurovision to rewrite its tied-result rules. Amina's second-place finish is widely considered one of the great injustices in Eurovision voting history. Mythology The 1991 result is sometimes remembered as a simple French loss; in fact France and Sweden tied on points.