Junior Eurovision 2017 is over, and we have a winner!
For the first time, Georgia hosted the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in their capital city Tbilisi, and they sure did a great job of it. The nation dazzled us with their stage and their hosts, former Junior Eurovision participant Lizi Pop and Helen Kalandadze, but the real stars of the show were the 16 participants who took to the stage, all in the hopes of being the next Junior Eurovision winner!
The show was opened with last year’s winner Mariam Mamadashvili and her song Mzeo, as well as all this year’s competing entries performing the theme song of this year’s contest, Shine Bright. The competition portion of the show began with Cyprus and Nicole Nicolaou with her song I Wanna Be a Star, and ended with Italy’s artist Maria Iside Fiore with her song Scelgo.
The voting of this year’s show was decided by 50% public vote, inclusive of a two stage online vote, as well as 50% jury vote. The jury part of the vote went smoothly, however there were some issues with the live part of the online voting, where not long after the site was opened for voting after all 16 performances, the website seemed to have crashed leaving many voters unsatisfied. Nevertheless, the show had to continue, and eventually we got the result.
First up was the announcement of the jury votes. The most popular entry with the juries was Georgia, who received no less than six 12 points. Following behind was Russia who received 4, and Armenia, Australia, Belarus, Malta, Poland and Ukraine all received one set of 12 points from the juries.
Next up was the allocation of points from the online vote. The announcement went from least amount of points, and as we got closer to the reveal of the highest points, the winner still remained unclear. Although both The Netherlands and Malta didn’t do as well in the jury voting, these two nations were the top of the online voting, with the Netherlands scoring the most points with 112, which shot them up to an impressive 4th place.
Coming third we have Australia’s own Isabella Clarke with her song Speak Up, which was the best result Australia have had at Junior Eurovision out of three participations. In second place, only missing out on the win by three points was Georgia’s Grigol Kipshidze, close to giving Georgia back to back wins. Beating host nation Georgia was Russia with Polina Bogusevich and her moving ballad called Wings.
On the other side of the table, we had Cyprus unfortunately finishing in last place, then Ireland, Portugal, Albania and FYR Macedonia. Rounding out the results, we had Belarus finish in 5th and Armenia in 6th, Ukraine in 7th and Poland in 8th, Malta, Serbia and Italy in 9th, 10th and 11th respectively.
You can watch the show on the official Junior Eurovision YouTube channel, as well as all their behind the scenes material and rehearsals. What do you think of the winner?
