Junior Eurovision 2023 — Recap
The Junior Eurovision contest has come and gone, and what a year it was! France take the win for the second year in a row, a feat previously only achieved by Poland. In addition, France has now tied for most wins with Georgia, similar to how Sweden tied Ireland’s record in adult Eurovision. Completely by coincidence, France ended up being my favourite in both contests this year, and while they unfortuantely did not do great in the adult contest, they sure did well here!
As the winner of both the jury and the online vote, France definitely deserved their win, and it actually performed better than I anticipated since I was sceptical that juries would like it. I honestly did not think that France could pull a repeat victory, but their song truly was phenomenal, even against strong competition, so once the votes started coming in, it looked like the result was clear. That being said, Spain and Armenia did put up a good fight, but overall I am very happy with the result, more so than the other contest this year...
Other favourites of mine like Ukraine and the UK did well which was nice to see, as did Poland, proving that my country is much better at Junior Eurovision for some reason. Send these artists to the adult contest one day! The only major robbery for me was Estonia, which deserved so much better! Ireland also deserved a little better than last place, but I wasn’t too disappointed as it was hardly my favourite.
In terms of my other predictions, I ended up getting 12/16 correct in terms of which half the songs would end up in, so my predictions were surprisingly accurate. The biggest miss would have to be Armenia which definitely did not finish in the bottom half! It was doing shockingly well with the juries, and then just okay with the online vote which is where I would have expected it to shine, but still ended up in a respectable third place.
This year certainly continued the streak of high quality songs in the junior contest, and I would say it was actually considerably better than last years batch, which was still pretty good. In fact, some of these songs put entries from the adult contest to shame… Seeing a full contest be started and wrapped up in two and a half hours is honestly a little refreshing compared to the week long process that the adult contest is, so I am glad that we have this to look forward to as it is not a massive commitment, and consistently produces high quality music despite the young age of the artists!
Let’s hope this high standard will continue for years to come, and remember, no bullism!
