The 21st edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast live from Nice, France.
16 countries competed at this year’s edition, and once all was said and done Zoé Clauzure from France was declared the winner of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2023 with the song ‘Cœur’.
Zoé Clauzure from France was crowned winner based on voting from national juries in all 16 competing countries. For the seventh time, viewers from around the world could also vote for their favorite songs in two windows: Online voting before the show, where the voting was based on snippets of rehearsals, and online voting during the show, where the viewers could vote during the 15 minutes after the last performance.
[Article continues with embedded video and results table…]
I had no idea there even was a junior version
Eurovision is dead to me until they remove the expert panels. The drip was cha cha cha last year. It’s rigged!
I agree the expert panels are shit, and I’m soured from this year’s, too. It seemed like they weighed it heavily towards Sweden so they’d get to host 2024 because it’s ABBA’s 50th anniversary. More and more acts have been pop ballads with hardly any stage show lately as well. I’ll watch next year, but if it doesn’t improve, I’ll be off, too.
I’m not sure how much you know about Eurovision, but each country’s jury is appointed by the participating national broadcaster, not the organisers. And we’ve seen before that if the points announced during the show are different from what a country’s jury voted, the national broadcaster loudly complains about it (see the 2022 jury drama). This means that if there was some conspiracy to give Sweden points, the broadcasters and their jury would have to be in on it too, including those of Finland, Moldova, Israel, etc (which all gave 12p to Sweden) – certainly not countries that have any interest in Sweden winning. I can’t imagine the EBU pulling this off and compromising their own integrity just for a nice anniversary.
I think the actual reason for the disparity between the jury vote and the televote is more nuanced than that. The makeup of the juries could play a role here: it’s only five people per country, and it’s largely radio hosts, TV personalities, and songwriters, who have already established themselves in the industry. So it’s not a conspiracy, just bias. Another factor is that the juries only give points to the countries they ranked at the very top; the 11th best song gets the same number of points as the 26th ranked song: zero. By design, this will mean one country or a few countries will get a big jury lead, then some countries get in the 100s of points, and most get less than 60 points. And the same with the televote. This year this was quite obvious, but it’s not the first time. In 2017, Salvador Sobral got even more jury points than Loreen got this year, but because he was also the televote favourite, no one said his victory was undeserved.
