Wurst voted Eurovision’s best

In the end, Wurst was voted the best.

Wurst, sporting high heels, butterfly eyelashes, and a full beard, topped the Netherlands’ modern- country duo the Common Linnets, who sang ‘Calm After The Storm’.

“For me, my dream came true,” Wurst, 25, whose birth name is Tom Neuwirth, said after the win. “But for our society, it just showed me that there are people out there who want to go into the future and go on, you know, not stepping back or thinking in the past.”

The Danish organisers had declared tolerance a main theme for this year’s event, and the rainbow- coloured flag symbolising gay pride has been flying across Copenhagen during the past week.

“I hope we can change just a few minds,” said Wurst’s agent, René Berto. “It is just a lady with a beard. But it is like we have landed on the moon.”

Wurst, Austria’s first Eurovision winner since 1966, received the biggest cheers from the audience but was also the target of controversy. Online petitions were started in Belarus, Armenia, and Russia — whose government passed a law last year banning “gay propaganda” among minors — to have Wurst removed or edited out of broadcasts in their countries.

The Eurovision, which has been held annually since 1956, was created to help foster unity after the Second World War and is meant to be non-political.

However, political strife slipped between the cracks at this year’s contest.

Many booed when the Russian contestants, the 17-year-old Tolmachevy twin sisters, singing ‘Shine’, were presented at Saturday’s opening ceremony and again when they were awarded points from other, mostly neighbouring, nations. It was widely speculated that Russia’s entry could suffer for the country’s annexation of Crimea and the government’s intransigence on gay rights.

Ukrainian singer Mariya Yaremchuk, 21, got huge cheers at her performance.

Adding to controversy, organisers said votes from Crimea count as Ukrainian votes, because tallies are based on existing national telephone codes. Ukraine’s song was voted the sixth best of the 26 songs, and Russia’s was seventh.