Sweden’s Loreen wins 2023 Eurovision Song Contest

It was nowhere near a tight race, with national juries favoring Loreen’s Sweden. The tally of the audience votes eventually sealed the deal and confirmed Loreen as this year’s Eurovision champion. Sweden will host the next Eurovision in 2024!

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Following the 2022 victory of the Ukrainian Kalush Orchestra with their “Stefania”, the show according to the rules should be hosted in Ukraine. Due to the ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) decided that the event would be hosted by Liverpool.

As a nod to Ukraine, however, one of the hosts was Ukrainian singer Julia Sanina, supported by Irish actor and TV host Graham Norton, British actress Hannah Waddingham, and British singer Alesha Dixon.

Those were not all nods to Ukraine. The showrunners further preceded every performance with vistas from Ukraine showing historical monuments or places of natural beauty, followed by corresponding sites in the U.K. and then finally the country of the upcoming performer.

There were also frequent shoutouts to Ukrainians watching at home, or wherever the war hurled them, invariably garnering enthusiastic reactions from the crowd gathered in Liverpool M&S Bank Arena, the event’s venue.

The show opened with a parade of flags, during which last year’s winners, Kalush Orchestra, performed their songs, as did several other Ukrainian performers. Most notably, Kalush’s performance was remotely accompanied by Princess of Wales Katherine herself, performing Stefania on a grand piano.

As always, the songs represented an eclectic collection of musical genres and of course, the performers also represented a collection of colorful personalities who performed in their native languages or English. With 26 acts competing, the voting audience and national juries definitely had some great music and dazzling performances to pick from.

And then finally came the moment everybody was impatiently waiting for: the tallying of the jury and audience votes.

First, 37 national juries (from EBU national countries that participated, including those that did not qualify for the finals out of the semis) would allocate 12, 10, or 8-1 points to performers from any other country. Then came the time to tally votes from audiences which would be presented as an aggregate.

It quickly became apparent, that the juries favored the Swedish performer, Loreen, and her “Tattoo”.

After the juries’ votes were tallied, Sweden’s Loreen came in first (with 340 jury points), followed by Israel (177), and Italy (176), with Finland and Estonia in close pursuit.

Then came audience votes from all other countries and around the world came in, and it quickly became apparent that unseating the Swedes would be a challenge.

Finland supplanted Sweden with their act at one point, Italy took over Israel, but at the end of the evening, there was no mistake as to who won.

Loreen representing Sweden won the most love with “Tattoo”. Congratulations to Loreen and Sweden, who will host the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest!