Pop Heist has enlisted the hosts of the podcast Eurovangelists to provide their guidance and expertise at the forefront of our coverage of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest. You can follow their on-the-ground reactions from Basel (and beyond!) over on Instagram at @eurovangelists.
Another chapter of the Eurovision Song Contest is in the books, and with it, the latest ESC champion is crowned: JJ of Austria with his song, "Wasted Love." On the surface, it feels a bit similar to last year's winner "The Code" with its operatic flourishes and stuttering high notes, but we can't deny JJ's obvious vocal gifts lend an otherworldly quality to this ode to heartbreak. A past ESC contestant and fan favorite also gets a win on this one, with Teodora Špirić of 2023's Teya & Salena being one of the songwriters, alongside producer Thomas Thurner and JJ himself, credited under his real name, Johannes Pietsch.
JJ has given us a new page in Eurovision history by being the first winner of Asian descent, as JJ's mother, who was in the audience cheering on her son Saturday night at St. Jakobshalle, is Filipino. JJ also had a lot of fellow artists joyfully congratulating him after his win, and seemed to be extremely well-liked in the green room every time the cameras found him (he and Sissal of Denmark seemed to become instant besties). And for our part, we'd be more than happy to spend a week in Vienna, or Innsbrook, or Salzburg, next May.
But this result didn't come without a lot of surprises and upsets along the way. Let's dig in!
Jury points (i.e., those assigned by a group of musicians, producers and critics from a particular country) came down along expected lines… mostly. JJ's vocal skill earned him big numbers as most oddsmakers and fans predicted it would, based on Nemo's success last year. Perennial televote ballad favorites like France and Italy similarly fared well, tallying up to triple digits with songs that are right in line with the sort of fare they've been sending for decades. We assumed Switzerland's tender song "Voyage" would also appeal to juries, but 214 points was above what we would've guessed for the hometown hero, Basel's own Zoë Më.
If you were shocked to see Claude of the Netherlands racking up big jury points despite his minor flub, remember that juries award their points based on a Friday evening dress rehearsal performance that only they (and the ticketed in — person audience) are allowed to view. So theoretically, he was perfect in that one! We would've liked to see a little more credit go to the divas of Spain and Poland, Melody and Justyna Steczkowska, but at least Justyna got a commensurate televote response to compensate and take her to 14th.
Speaking of the televote, it was full of unexpected twists and turns this year. In addition to their jury votes, each country gets another set of points to hand out based on phone or in-app votes from their country's Eurovision faithful known as either the televote or the public vote. We thought we might be being cruel in putting "UK receives 0 televote" on our ESC 2025 bingo cards (even though that exact thing happened last year [unfair] and in 2021 [fair]) — but their televote result no doubt had Remember Monday asking, "What The Hell Just Happened?" And sadly they weren't the only ones; Zoë Më of Switzerland got a boatload of jury points only to find herself completely shut out in the public vote. We didn't have either one pegged as a televote darling, but it was a little surprising to see both come up with nothing.
And while 2, 8, and 10 points aren't technically nothing, it was surprising to see Sissal, Miriana Conte, and Melody come up short for Denmark, Malta, and Spain, especially considering the reaction to all three of those songs in the arena. Spanish fans were some of the most vocal the entire time we were in Basel (and justifiably so!), but where was the televote support? And Miriana is admittedly from an extremely small country without a strong diaspora across Europe like Ukraine or even say, Armenia, but she was an internet favorite from day one — are we to believe that's of no value in the Grand Final? She's serving confused, honey.
Not to harp on about reactions in the arena not converting into votes, but you would not believe how pumped people were to shout along to San Marino's artist Gabry Ponte and his entry, "Tutta L'Italia," a song that every single person was ready to shout "HEY!" along to when they took the stage. But Gabry found himself dead last in the Grand Final, earning just 27 points from both jury and televote (18 of them from Italy out of a possible 24 — not quite "Tutta L'Italia," but nearly). And the sheer force with which people reacted to Erika Vikman's song in person during Semi 2 and the Grand Final had us completely convinced she would be holding a glass trophy by the end of the week. But despite having decent scores in both, neither her jury vote nor her televote fully matched that rabid enthusiasm that left people chanting, "Ich komme! Ich komme!" long after she left the stage.
Albania's "Zjerm" placed a very respectable 8th thanks to the televote, but probably also deserved a bit stronger backing from the jury vote for its innovative staging and powerful vocal performance from Beatrice Gjergji of Shkodra Elektronike. It's one of their best in a long time, and it would've been nice to see them in the Top 5, but we'll take Top 10. Similarly, we're happy to see Klavdia of Greece get their best result in a decade with her emotional performance of "Asteromata," which also featured some of the best staging of the competition.
We knew for months Tommy Cash was going to get a boatload of televote points thanks to his fame as an internet provocateur and support from past fan favorites like Joost Klein and Kaarija. The surprise came when he managed to rise to 9th place in the jury voting, ahead of vocal powerhouses like Finland, Albania, Denmark, Spain, and Poland — which, based on his vocals at the Grand Final, doesn't quite add up. It's not always about vocals, but it often is for juries, so we're just a little confused what the metric was. Some had Tommy pegged as a potential winner early on even though he seems to be trolling the contest, but it hardly seems so far-fetched now, seeing how close he came.
And despite only netting 60 jury points, Yuval Raphael's "New Day Will Rise" leaped to the top of the scoreboard, thanks to grabbing first place in the public vote with 295 televote points. That number might come as a surprise due to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as continuing rise in antisemitic incidents here in the US and abroad, but Israel won a lion's share of the televote both this year as well as last year. It's hard to account for their televote popularity without recognizing that there's Eurovision viewers in every country in Europe that are sympathetic to Israel, and they're voting in support. Since it's not possible for those who oppose the Netanyahu government's actions to cast an anti-vote, those votes tend to carry a lot of countries for Israel.
The honest truth is most people who watch Eurovision don't vote in Eurovision. Well over 150 million people watch the Grand Final, but it isn't free to vote for your favorite. And just like American Idol or other shows like it in the US, most people who watch don't want to spend a few bucks on a singing competition. Obviously thousands of people do vote, but if even only a marginally higher percentage of a given country's Eurovision fans vote for Israel over another artist, those votes result in 12 points for Israel from multiple nations: 13 countries in 2025, 15 countries in 2024. So that's one potential explanation for the sizable Israel televote score.
We might have more insight into how the televote worked this year soon, as Spain's national broadcaster has asked for a full audit of the 142,688 votes cast by Spanish viewers. If every vote was cast by a single person, that's only 2.5% of the Spanish ESC audience of nearly six million, out of the total Spanish population of 49 million. But you can vote up to 20 times on the same credit card — I myself cast 10 votes for Latvia in Semi 2 — so the actual percentage of voters as opposed to votes is likely below 2%, potentially even below 1%. This is just one country, so the results might not hold true across Europe, but it's possible that less than a single percent of the viewership could be deciding Spain's public vote.
In the end, JJ managed to come first in the jury vote and fourth in the public vote, and coming in the top 5 in both halves of the vote has been the key for every single winner since Eurovision adopted the current jury/public voting format in 2016. His success with both halves of the vote earned him the glass trophy and the right to his winner's reprise. Once he collected himself, he casually ripped his song's high notes while leaning on a podium, as it doesn't seem to tax him in the slightest to sing in that register.
So congratulations to JJ for an incredible performance, and we have no doubt Austria's going to host a great contest next year. But in looking ahead to 2026, we're hoping this is the last of the opera-inspired winners for a little while: we're not talking about the Eurovision Aria Contest, after all. There's got to be a way to earn big jury points without conservatory training in the mid-2020s. We've had two in the last two years, and we're happy to add them to the ESC song book, but it's time for something new. Fingers crossed!
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
