LIVERPOOL: With her soaring pop song Tattoo, Sweden’s Loreen has won the Eurovision Song Contest for the second time.
In a close vote, the celebrity, who previously won the contest in 2012, defeated Finland’s Käärijä.
Lorin Zineb Nora Talhaoui, better known by her stage name Loreen, is a Swedish singer-songwriter. She won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 with the song “Euphoria”. She is the first woman and the second performer to have won the competition twice.
Mae Muller of the UK fell short of Sam Ryder’s achievement from the previous year, finishing in 25th place, one place above the bottom.
In addition, the Kalush Orchestra, last year’s victors, included a surprise appearance by the Princess of Wales on the piano.
After Ireland’s Johnny Logan, Loreen is the only other person to have won the Eurovision Song Contest twice. She is also the first woman.
She stated as she accepted the prize, “This is very overwhelming. I’m really appreciative. I’m very grateful. In my wildest thoughts, I never imagined that this would occur.”
Sweden’s victory means it would host next year’s competition that also marks the 50th anniversary of Abba’s historic victory with Waterloo in 1974.
Ireland crashed out of this year’s competition at the semi-final stage for the fifth year in a row as their head of delegation called it “devastating”.
This year’s top three acts were: Loreen’s Tattoo (583 points) Käärijä (Finland) Cha Cha Cha (526 points) and Noa Kirel (Israel) Unicorn (362 points) while Mae Muller only picked up 24 points, leaving the UK near the lowest of the leaderboard. It was “not the result we hoped for,” she said in a twwet after the show.
On behalf of the conflict-torn Ukraine, which won in 2022, Liverpool hosted the competition this year.
The previous year’s champions, Kalush Orchestra, opened the event with a pre-recorded portion from Kyiv in which they performed an extended version of their song Stefania.
As the band boarded a train from Kyiv’s famous Maidan Nezalezhnosti metro station and came on the stage of the Liverpool Arena, stars like Joss Stone, Sam Ryder, and Andrew Lloyd Webber brought a British twist to the song.
In a short clip filmed earlier this month in Windsor Castle’s red drawing room, the Princess of Wales provided piano accompaniment.
When Kalush returned to the stage, they played their brand-new track Changes, which had the words “Give my all down to the wire / Set me free.”
It was the first of many references to the Ukrainian war in a contest that took a more political tone than most editions of Eurovision.
