“Now we’re moving to Poland,” says host Ida Nowakowska, glancing down at the screen in front of her inside a TV studio in Warsaw.
We are live at Junior Eurovision 2020 and going through the scores from the online vote. Poland are already struggling in the battle to win back-to-back-to-back Junior Eurovision titles, with juries placing their entry ‘I’ll Be Standing’ 9th of the 12 competitors.
At this point I’m expecting some added suspense, a drumroll, a pause in the background music – I’m expecting Poland to score some huge epic score from the online vote and lift them up at least into the podium positions. In my preview article about Poland’s chances for 2020 I suggested that the Polish entry “could recite the alphabet and would still come top half in the online vote comfortably”.
This was going to be Junior Eurovision’s KEiiNO moment.
I was about to eat my words big time. With barely a second to breathe Ida launches straight into her spiel, “who got an additional 44 points!”
I had to debate if there was an exclamation mark in that sentence, so forced was the positive spin on the score announcement. 44 points resulted in Poland ultimately finishing Junior Eurovision in eight place out of just twelve participants, 9th from jurors and joint 8th from online voting and well out of contention for the victory. This is despite viewing figures for Junior Eurovision 2020 suggesting more than half of all viewers were within Poland.
So what happened?
Why Poland’s Vote Should Dominate
The theory has been this. Those viewing figures should mean that lots more people in Poland vote, and lots more people in Poland will vote for Poland. This theory seemed solid. Online voting for 2019 showed a Polish landslide but then also followed by France, Spain, The Netherlands and Kazakhstan which, while not on the same scale as in Poland, are some of the largest markets for Junior Eurovision. The bottom of the table was Albania, Malta and Wales which have viewing figures in the scale of thousands, not millions.
The biggest correlating factor in terms of the success of your online vote is your viewing figures. That trend continued into the 2020 Junior Eurovision show as well – France won, followed by Spain, Kazakhstan and The Netherlands in also the exact same ratios as the previous year. Newcomers Germany, showing on a dedicated kids TV channel, and Georgia were at the rear of the online vote.
Every other high performing country in Junior Eurovision with the online vote did well in 2020 as well. It is shocking that Poland would not be in the mix when otherwise the pattern was almost exactly to the form book from previous years.
So something else must have caused the Polish vote to collapse.
Why The Polish Vote Collapsed
Firstly the song. Both of Poland’s winners, whether you personally like them or not, were bona fide commercial hits. 2018 winner ‘Anyone I Want To Be’ has over 8 million streams on Spotify, and 2019 winner ‘Superhero’ sits at 12.5 million. 2020’s ‘I’ll Be Standing’? Less than one million. Even considering the added exposure being a winner helps – that difference is enormous.
There’s also the reality of Junior Eurovision and this vote-for-your-own mentality that the show can play out as a popularity contest in the days beforehand, with voting opening on the Friday evening before the show. Artists themselves, plus other influencers and broadcasters spend an unsavory amount of time pressuring their followers to vote. Both Roksana Węgiel and Viki Gabor have a superstar following in the Polish music industry despite their tender age. Roksana boasts in December 2021 1.3 million Instagram followers and Viki has 682,000. Ala Tracz? A more humble 87,000. It is not only the song that wasn’t a huge hit it was also the artist themselves didn’t have the pulling power needed to squeeze the votes out. Some of that may be down to the fact Ala was only 10 years old at the time of competing, much younger than the other two were.
There’s another factor that I want to put forward and that is possible voter apathy in Poland. The desire to win Junior Eurovision for three consecutive years may wane. With the pandemic in full swing last year, pre-vaccine, and artists performing remotely or via pre-recorded performances, the sense of celebration in the event may also dwindle. This was no celebration that we witnessed in Gliwice the year prior with a full and incredibly passionate arena.
There’s also the difficult nature of being proud in Poland in current times. Poland is politically an increasingly split nation, with their Presidential runoff in July 2020 that led to the re-election of Andrzej Duda by 51 percent to 49 percent in a huge ideological split. This election was not without controversy, with the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights claiming that public broadcaster TVP “failed in its legal duty to provide balanced and impartial coverage” in part for giving more airtime to the incumbent.
Later that same year in August protests in support of LGBT rights saw 48 people were arrested in events described as the Polish Stonewall. October witnessed the largest protests in Poland since the revolutions of 1989, sparked by the government’s plans for tighter rules on abortion. Known as the Women’s Strike, in that month alone it is thought that half a million Poles were actively protesting against the government.
This is hardly the ideal run-up to mobilising a nation to be proud of themselves, and to vote for their own country to win an event like Eurovision, Junior or otherwise. It’s easy to imagine, sitting down to Sunday afternoon TV in November, that the once-loyal voting public at home may be less inclined to support the TVP entry.
A Return To Form For 2021?
The emergence of Sara Egwu-James as a contestant in Poland’s selection to Junior Eurovision gave us an automatic favourite to be Poland’s representative. The most recent winner of The Voice Kids Poland had the profile that made her an unstoppable force on her way to be Poland’s representative in Junior Eurovision this year. Bouncing off Junior Eurovision there is far more chance that post-Junior Eurovision Sara becomes a new Roksana or Viki rather than Ala in terms of influence and opportunities.
The song is also one to mention here as well. ‘Somebody’ is a very accessible pop song with a gorgeous melody line that fulfils that desirable songwriter’s niche of sounding familiar and fresh at the same time. Performances of the song show it being confidently sung and it transcends the difficult Junior Eurovision problem of sounding kid-friendly without being childish – this is proper music that still feels appropriate and likeable.
And while Poland’s troubles politically may not be solved by any stretch of the imagination Sara, as Poland’s representative, is somebody the nation has warmed to through her TV opportunities. While we note that Eurovision and politics have this twisted history in the past, it is the individual artists and their appeal that is far more important. Votes for ‘Poland’ may not actually be that, but be votes for ‘Sara’.
Poland has an artist and song that I suspect many Junior Eurovision viewers will enjoy, and a significant number of those in Poland will want to vote for her and want to see her do well. Remember the voting system this year is unchanged, and viewers must vote for three different songs in their voting – but that can include the nation they are from.
Assuming Poland records viewing figures in the millions again, while most other competing nations are a magnitude away, Poland’s one year blip will surely just be that.
The question mark now will be if anybody else can match Sara in the quest to get votes.