BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

09/12/2007

JESC 2007: voting analysis

Tonight, the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2007 took place in Rotterdam, Netherlands and saw Belarus winning for the second time with Alexey Zhigalkovich and his song S druzyami. As always, we offer the real Song Contest freaks a close look on the statistics.

Please note: in all statistics concerning points given and received, the 12 points every country scored automatically are not included.

Voting statistics

Belarus has received points from all countries but Cyprus, all the other countries gave at least four points and four times the twelve points. The runner-ups from Armenia were obviously polarizing: they received seven times the douze, twice the ten, once eight, seven and five - and four times not a single vote. Although with 17 countries competing it is very likely that a country receives points from all countries (since every country has to give points to ten out of 16 other countries), only Russia and Serbia managed to do so - they finished third and sixth respectively.

Records

Belarus has scored an average of 8.56 points - the lowest average score of a winner ever. On the other hand, Armenia has scored the second highest average of points of a runner-up with 8.50. Apart from the first contest in 2003, Armenia is also the most succesful debuting country ever reaching second place. The other debutants Georgia and Bulgaria also did quite well finishing fourth and seventh respectively while Lithuania finished only 13th. Countries that have achieved their best results so far are Serbia and F.Y.R. Macedonia while Greece, Portugal and Belgium have reached their worst placings so far.

The runing order

For the third year in a row, the country that performed last finished first. Last year, the songs that reached the top 3 were all performed in the second half, this year it is less obvious that songs performed late do better: the Armanian entry was performed third and finished second, the Serbian entry that came third was number nine of the evening and the fourth placed song from Gerogia has even opened the show. On the other hand, the songs performed at number 14, 15 and 16 did not reach the top 10 with Greece coming last. Of course, the question comes up if the new voting system, which means that you can vote right after the show begins, does affect the results after all. But there is one thing that will probably never change: the song performed second did not do well at all: Belgium finished third from last.

Diaspora voting

That's a sensitive subject. First of all it has to be pointed out that giving points to a neighbouring country does not necessarily mean that there are "political" reasons - the televoters may have also just thought that the song they have voted for was the best one! Nevertheless, there were some friendly neighbours as always: Belgium has received its only points from the Netherlands, Greece has received its only points from Cyprus (even if only two this year). Georgia and Armenia have exchanged their twelve points while the Netherlands have recieved their highest mark from Belgium, Russia from Belarus, F.Y.R. Macedonia from Bulgaria and Serbia and Cyprus from Greece. Nevertheless, there are other examples that don't prove diaspora voting: Malta gave its 4 - 12 points to Eastern countries, Sweden its top 4 marks. Furthermore, Sweden managed to reach the first half of the scoreboard the second year in a row without any other Scandinavian country taking part.

Belarus has scored an average of 6.72 points per non-former USSR country. If the other five countries had given Belarus the same average amount of points, Belarus would have probably not won the competition (it has to be taken into consideration that the "missing" points would have been given to other countries!). Nevertheless, with six former USSR countries taking part, this statistic is rather inaccurate: mathematically, it is very unlikely to be able to expect these countries give to the same average amount of points than the others.

Source:

http://www.esctoday.com/news/read/9836