Eurovision for trees reaches its zenith. Will Poland win again?

What makes a tree important?

Is it the ability to withstand storms, wars and human greed through the centuries? The people that rest in its shade, the lovers who carve their names, the playing children creating eternal memories?

Or is it just what country it grows in?

The organizers of the European Tree of the Year contest, a relatively niche event on the Brussels social calendar, have been grappling with these questions for years.

The competition, which started in 2002 as a national event in Czechia before expanding to Europe in 2011, has over the years crowned an Estonian oak that stood in the middle of a football pitch; a lone pine that survived a flood in a Czech village; and a 500-year-old Romanian lime tree that is part of local folk legend.

The contest’s last four winners, however, all grew in Poland.

“From the beginning, the competition was not about the beauty of the trees, but about the stories and the communities. [But] the last four years, it became difficult because it turned into a competition between nations,” said Petr Skřivánek, who runs the event on behalf of the Environmental Partnership Association, a Czech NGO.

Poland’s recent success is largely due to Make Life Harder, the country’s most popular Instagram meme account, which has been promoting the contest to its 1.7 million followers since 2021. The enthusiastic response has been both a blessing and a curse.

“It’s really good because it can really attract visitors. But any time the website is down, I know it’s because they posted a link to it,” Skřivánek said.

His routine as the overwhelmed website administrator is itself the subject of memes from the account.

“You don’t only vote for the tree that you like, but you have to vote for another tree — so you don’t just express support on a national level,” said Michal Wiezik, a Renew MEP who has been an ambassador for the contest since 2019. “But the Polish were able to crack the system.”

Things took a nastier turn last year, when a whiff of online hooliganism arrived to disturb the sylvan community.

MEP Michal Wiezik attends a European Parliament meeting in Brussels on Jan. 27, 2025. | Martin Bertrand/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

La Revuelta, a comedy talk show on Spain’s La 1 public broadcaster, launched a campaign to support their nation’s champion, the Pine of Juan Molinera. The program identified a Polish tree — Heart of the Dalkowskie Hills —  as its main competition. During the segment, as comedian Lalachus sang a cover of Eros Ramazzotti’s La cosa más bella (“The most beautiful thing”) in praise of the Spanish contestant, another comic held up signs saying “The Polish tree smells like armpits” and “The tree from Poland, what a load of shit.”

Make Life Harder shared the clips on Instagram, unleashing a bitter feud on social media. (Neither Make Life Harder, RTVE nor Lalachus replied to requests for comment from POLITICO.)

The tension ultimately spread to the European Parliament, which hosted the awards ceremony. “The atmosphere was not good in the venue. And on the stream, it was not nice either,” Skřivánek said.

Spain finished third; Poland won.

“I hope this was the first year and the last year when this competition became a space for spreading hate and being aggressive to others,” said Anna Gomułka in accepting the award for Heart of the Dalkowskie Hills.

“We felt we had to defend our honor. At some point, voting became an expression of patriotism,” Gomułka wrote in an email to POLITICO.

To avoid such tensions in future and to make the online vote more suspenseful, the organizers are now using a system of “tree points” in which trees from smaller countries get more points for each vote than trees from larger countries. As a result of the changes, the 2026 competition “was really less nationalist compared to previous years,” Skřivánek said.

This year’s winner will be named Tuesday during a ceremony in Brussels.