Congratulations to France on winning the 18th Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2020 – their first Junior Eurovision victory. Eleven-year-old Valentina won with J’imagine, confirming the result on Sunday 29 November after a contest staged by TVP and the EBU from Warsaw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was a rather different contest: the twelve competing countries ultimately took part, but the performances were recorded in studios in the participating countries rather than being performed together by the contestants in Poland.
The full results are captured from the official feed below.
France got around 730,000 votes in the online voting windows to score that 112 points, by the way. To clarify the result, those 112 points were France’s online-vote points, not the final total: France received 88 jury points and 112 online-vote points, giving them a winning total of 200. Kazakhstan finished second with 152 points and Spain third with 133.
The online vote represented half of the final result and took place in two stages, with viewers voting after preview clips and then again after the final performances. The EBU reported a record 4.5 million online votes overall.
It was also France’s first Junior Eurovision win after previous entries had finished sixth in 2004, second in 2018 and fifth in 2019. At the time, I described it as France’s first Song Contest-related event win in over 40 years: more precisely, that referred to France’s previous Eurovision Song Contest victory, Marie Myriam’s win in 1977. France had also won Eurovision Young Dancers in 1989, so the broader claim needs that qualification.
Here is Valentina’s official performance of J’imagine for France at Junior Eurovision 2020:
