The Junior Eurovision Song Contest, the longest standing spinoff from the main Song Contest we all know and love, has always had to deal with one of television’s most difficult balancing acts.
Yes, it can be a brilliant experience for our next generation to represent their nations on a huge stage with millions watching, but it also comes with its pressures and the risk that the environment puts undue pressure on our young participants.
Our participants list for the 2025 competition spans a healthy 18 countries from Armenia and host Georgia in the east, to The Netherlands and Ireland in the west, alongside three of the ‘Big Five’ nations with France, Spain and Italy participating.
But one region is notably missing – Northern Europe. This is despite the fact that different Junior Eurovision-like competitions exist and get primetime billing within public service broadcasters in the region.
That prompts us at ESC Insight to ask why. Why does Northern Europe not compete at Junior Eurovision, and can we learn anything by watching how they run their similar broadcast competitions for why any divisions may lie.
Denmark, Where Junior Eurovision Was Born
While Junior Eurovision can carve its history from its 2003 debut, the journey to create that collaboration started much earlier. Much like we can attribute the creation of the Eurovision Song Contest to the success of Sanremo in Italy during the early 1950’s, Junior Eurovision was sparked off by the success of MGP Junior.
MGP Junior began in Denmark in the year 2000, firstly as Børne1erens Melodi Grand Prix (as a part of programming from the Danish TV show Børne1erens) before taking the MGP moniker the year after.
In turn, this inspired a MGP Nordic that began with Denmark, Norway and Sweden holding an evening of competitive song action, with each nation bringing their top three from their own National Finals to the party.
And whilst Junior Eurovision began with optimism and a flurry of scandi-inspired togetherness when it was first launched ín Copenhagen in 2003, by 2006 only Sweden remained, and even then under the wings of commercial broadcaster TV4 rather than public broadcaster SVT.
For twenty years has Denmark not participated in Junior Eurovision, yet MGP lives on. Not only does it live on, it flourishes as a spectacle that most certainly would be the biggest Junior Eurovision National Final if it was to be lead to Eurovision.
MGP is held every winter and is primetime Saturday viewing. Not only is it held in the same arena as Denmark’s selection for Eurovision the week before, it is the same adult-scale stage with all the trappings and pyrotechnics.
And this isn’t just for show. This production fills even the biggest arenas in the country just as easily as the adult version, and even takes the participants on an multi-city tour of the country during the spring. Whilst on holiday in upcoming host city Frederikshavn this summer, the advertising was already published for the city’s 2026 hosting, with both MGP and the adult Melodi Grand Prix getting equal billing on the publicity material.
It begs the question, what did Denmark do right to get a nation behind their music show for kids?
The participants are fascinating compared to Junior Eurovision. Firstly the eight entrants selected to compete can come from a wider age range than Junior Eurovision, 8 to 15, but there’s also a much more restrictive criteria they must hurdle. The song.
Each artist at MGP has to have written the song themselves. Now if we go back to the roots of Junior Eurovision, this was also how that competition took its first steps. But it became understandably impossible to police for the EBU, and as Denmark left the competition the rule was quietly dropped.
To enter MGP, you have to enter with a song. If at any point an adult has helped you in the process (the example given in the rules document is a music teacher) then they have to fill in a signed document to explain what help has been provided and that the child is the sole rightsholder of the song. Furthermore, no professional acts are allowed to take part, so nobody who is already signed within the music industry can jump into the competition.
That the kids have to write their own songs doesn’t mean that every song is a story about pony-loving girls who meet at school and become best friends (although those songs do exist). Instead their eight song selection at MGP 2025 was breathtakingly modern, cool, and chart friendly, with the eventual winner ‘Lyst Til At Hop’ which recently surpassed three million Spotify streams. That winning number is a boyband-fronted hip-hop banger that, no, wouldn’t win the Eurovision Song Contest, but wouldn’t be as big in the hall as many of the other competing entries.
Indeed each of the eight MGP tracks have all crossed the one million streams number on Spotify, and with the kids as the sole rights holder of their tracks, what a great platform they have to potentially kick start any artist careers going forward.
What makes it particularly notable as a production, and one thing that differentiates it from Junior Eurovision, is the extra duty of care around each of the acts. The broadcaster takes on more responsibility with co-ordinating final productions and costuming together with the artist, and the rule about not allowing any children who have ever been professional means that pushy agents and marketers don’t get any way to influence the competition for their commercial interests.
With interest I watched the MGP production from Boxen to see what made the show work. Much of the show feels like Junior Eurovision does feel, with common song opening numbers and a real glow to the production from start to finish. This is emphasised throughout by the participants themselves, with the green room right in front of the stage and each act is choreographed to cheer each and every participant. You can’t miss them on the long shots – a gaggle of 20-odd sugar-fuelled children bopping up and down to each and every number in a little Eurovision bubble of unadulterated joy.
Voting is controlled too to minimise chance of failure – with a top three selected from the eight entrants heading to a superfinal, before a winners announcement. No points, no overly dramatic split screen drama, and more importantly no losers.
The quote that is often used to discuss Denmark’s non-participation comes from Jan Lagermand Lungme, who in 2015 was Entertainment Manager for the Danish broadcaster DR. Speaking to the broadcaster, Jan describes how Junior Eurovision is a “faithful copy” of its bigger adult competition, with a “solemn tone” that misses the “joy, humour and play” that DR wants children’s programming to focus on.
Some of this might be inevitable. Some of the gravitas of a competition between broadcasters and between nations with possible hosting rights up for grabs alongside other commercial interests means that Junior Eurovision inevitably will be more serious than a National Final. But some of it is also by design of the competition, to ensure that the focus is on the kids from start to finish, guiding them on a journey from start to showtime, but also the months after the competition.
Sweden, one-shot hello at the Junior sphere
While neighbours Norway have had a Junior competition from the MGP Nordic days until 2022, when Sweden decided to give up on Junior Eurovision back in 2014, so too did their National Final Lilla Melodifestivalen disappear from screens.
However, in what appears to have been a one-season wonder, SVT ran Hello Mello throughout the autumn and winter of 2024, with six shows and 25 different acts competing for the prize of being able to perform their song at Melodifestivalen itself.
Now, a full holistic attempt to replicate Denmark’s MGP concept this wasn’t, but there’s still plenty that should be picked out here that Junior Eurovision could do a lot to learn from.
No, the songs weren’t on the whole written by the participants themselves, and quite a few of the composers were names that were perhaps all too familiar to those names we know from Melodifestivalen heat after heat. But these songs were often of excellent production quality and fitted many of the participants well. One reason for that is that the age range of the participants was limited to a very narrow 13 to 15. This works for nudging a few younger Melodifestivalen songs down to be appropriate, but it also means that most of the participants have much more in common and can also be judged more fairly. Who can fairly say a tiny, cute 9 year old is better or worse than a mature and experienced 14 year old, that we have at Junior Eurovision today?
In addition, another win for the Hello Mello format was the use of a crew of backing dancers for each song, just like at Melodifestivalen, ensuring that there was a top quality team elevating each and every performance that could be lifted by their presence. Not only is it good entertainment, but it gave young dancers the same experience and chance to develop their skills as well.
I also appreciated the voting system of Hello Mello. While the final was decided by system of half jury and half televoting like Melodifestivalen and also like Junior Eurovision, when it came to the final score breakdown only the final top five were revealed, meaning all of the other acts in the bottom half of the placings are officially recorded as sixth place.
Junior Eurovision needs to also do take note of this and learn. It allows you to still have the pomp and ceremony of a jury vote as it is at the Song Contest, but then when televote scores come in you narrow down to a top five and you remove the chance of disappointed lingering shots of children receiving their placings in the bottom half of the leaderboard.
Finally, the prize. The winner from Hello Mello had the right to come to Melodifestivalen and perform as a part of the country’s biggest television show. We have previously advocated that this should also be a good for the main Song Contest, our Junior Eurovision winners are consistently at a talent level where they would most definitely not be out of place, and it provides a really exciting honour for those young performers who are dreaming of their time at the Contest themselves.
Hello Mello may have only run one season in Sweden. Perhaps starting off with a six week long Melfest replica was a jump too ambitious, and the songs haven’t moved the needle in the same way as Denmark’s equivalent did. The excellent winner ‘Breaking My Heart’, surely a Junior Eurovision contender with appropriate Swedish lyrics, has a respectable 400,000 streams on Spotify. A decent total but far below what winners in neighbouring countries are able to achieve.
Lessons to Learn
Taken together, Denmark’s MGP and Sweden’s brief Hello Mello experiment underline a consistent truth about why Northern Europe remains absent from Junior Eurovision. It is not disinterest, nor a lack of musical talent, nor any hesitation about placing young performers on major broadcast stages.
The Nordic broadcasters that have invested in their own junior formats have done so with frameworks that privilege development over competition, authorship over industry interests, and a tightly managed duty of care, support and connection than what an international contest inevitably creates.
Junior Eurovision, by design, mirrors perhaps too strongly the Eurovision Song Contest in format, and in the pressure of representing your nation. Those pressures create a tone that is difficult to soften. Meanwhile, formats like MGP and Hello Mello succeed precisely because they minimise those pressures, and maximise the joy.
That does not imply that Junior Eurovision is inherently unsuitable for Northern Europe. But it does suggest that any return of Nordic broadcasters would require more than cosmetic adjustments to scoring systems, age limits and song ownership rules. It would require a shift in how the contest defines success and how it frames the responsibilities owed to its youngest competitors. There would need to be a seismic shift in how we deal with pressure, and how we make it appropriate, so nobody at Junior Eurovision feels they are a failure.
Denmark’s MGP format is now so established that it is a deep tradition for the country and stands alongside its adult variant equally. There’s few television formats as joyous as this, and it should be a role model for the type of space Junior Eurovision should be.
Whether the rest of Europe will ever get to that same space again remains to be seen.