Was Loreen’s televote score the worst ever for a winner?

It has sadly become a bit of a tradition in the Eurovision universe: The Day After. Last night, Loreen took her second Eurovision crown and famously became the first woman to do so. However, the Swedish songstress did not win the televoting. Instead, her victory is mainly thanks to the national juries. It leads us to wonder: Is Loreen’s televote score the worst ever for a winner?

Sweden’s Loreen gets 11.3%

First of all, we decided to take a look at how many televoting points the winners since 1999 received. The only year we’ve excluded is 2013, as we do not know the exact split results – only average positions. We’ve taken all other years into account.

Looking that, we saw that Loreen received 243 points for her Tattoo. The maximum any country could receive in televoting last night was 444 points: 37 votes (36 countries plus the Rest of the World vote), all handing out a top score of 12 points. With Loreen’s 243, that comes down to a percentage score of 54.7%. Televoting winners Finland scored 376 points, a whopping 84.7%. But how does Sweden’s 54.7% compare to previous winners?

It has to be said that Tattoo finds itself relatively close to the bottom when it comes to this stat. It has nearly the same percentage score as Arcade by Duncan Laurence – the last Eurovision winner before Loreen who did not win the public vote. Iconic winners such as Lena and Helena Paparizou however fought worse battles and scored less with the public vote (53.3% and 50.4%). The worst scoring winner was Azerbaijan back in 2011 with just 44.2%. However, for all three of these goes that they eventually did win the televote in their year. It was just a close battle.

At the top of the scoreboard, we find last year’s winners Kalush Orchestra (19.4%), followed by Alexander Rybak (15.9%) and Salvador Sobral (15.8%). The only other winner scoring over 15% of the total televote is the Estonian winner from 2001. It just goes to show how strong Käärijä’s televote score was last night as he would have had the second best ever televote result in Eurovision history, only behind Ukraine 2022.

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The first ever winner without a douze…

The more shocking stat of the night was discovered by Eurovision fans soon after the release of the full results last night. According to Eurovision.tv, Loreen received zero top marks from televoters in Europe. Finland received eighteen, Sweden had to settle for a lot of tens and eights – but no twelves.

It is very safe to say that, without a single televote douze points, Sweden land at the bottom of the score table when it comes to douzes for winners. Closest to Loreen is Duncan Laurence yet again. The man that won for the Netherlands in 2019 collected just two douzes for his Arcade. Completing the bottom three is a fellow Swede, with Måns Zelmerlöw receiving just three top marks for Heroes in 2015.

At the other end of the scale – which winners scored the most douzes from televoters? The statistics for this are not complete as we do not have the individual split results between 2009 and 2013. Nevertheless, the top looks very similar to what we saw in the general points calculation: Kalush Orchestra easily top the scoreboard with 71.8% of the potential twelves going their way. Salvador Sobral once again does very well, as do Dave Benton, Tanel Padar & 2XL from Estonia. Interesting here is the high score for Helena Paparizou. Greece’s only winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005 only gathered 50.4% of the total potential points, but she did grab 26.3% of the potential twelves. A conclusion you could draw from that is that she scored lots of low points as well as twelves – bringing her to victory in Kyiv.

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Is Loreen’s televote score the worst ever then?

To answer the question whether Tattoo had the worst televote score to go on and win Eurovision, we will look at both of the tables above and draw a conclusion.

Loreen did not have the worst possible televote score to win the Eurovision Song Contest. Only Azerbaijan in 2011 dropped below half of the maximum available, making them a good candidate for the worst scorers. In terms of top marks, however, Loreen has definitely achieved something remarkable: Winning the Eurovision Song Contest without a televote douze.

All in all, this is only the second time in history that the televote winner did not win the Eurovision Song Contest. This previously happened in 2019 when KEiiNO from Norway surprised the world and took the crown of televoters in Tel Aviv. Duncan Laurence, who won neither the jury nor the televote, merely benefited from the major differences between the two. Jury winners North Macedonia were nowhere to be seen in a televote.

So to conclude: Loreen’s televote result is one of the poorer ones for a Eurovision winner. Does that discredit her victory last night? No, it does not. The Eurovision Song Contest has a 50/50 system and looking at the airplay Tattoo has been getting, it is a very deserving winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.

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