Yesterday, the Junior Eurovision Song Contest took place in Bucharest, Romania and saw Russia winning for the very first time with Nastya & Masha Tolmacheva – who might be called Russia's answer to the Olsen twins – and their song Vesna. As always, we offer the real Song Contest freaks a close look on the statistics.

Big Poll
With the votes cast, it turns out that the esctoday.com Big Poll prediction wasvery close to the actual result. Not only the top three were predicted right (Belarus: predicted first, finished second; Russia: predicted second, finished first, Sweden: predicted and finished third) but also the last place for F.Y.R. Macedonia was clearly seen by the esctoday.com visitors. Furthermore, Belgium (seventh) and Ukraine (ninth) were predicted right. Serbia made the biggest climb: only reaching 14th position in the Big Poll, they came fifth in the contest. Tipped on 5th / 6th position they only ended up on 13th / 12th place.

Records
The Russian victory might be the most impressive one in the history of the Junior contest: They got points from every country, eight times the douze, five times the ten and twice four points. Sisters Tolmatchevy are also the winners with highest average of points received per country: 10.1, a result that has never been achieved in the adult contest either. Of course, this was the best Russian result so far. Spain reached their worst result so far, which still means a fourth place. They had finished in the top two on every occasion before. Sweden achieved their best result with a third place. Before, Sweden had always finished in the bottom four. Worth noting: Remarkable seven out of 15 competing countried received points from every other participant. Nevertheless, it should be made clear that each country had to give points to ten out of fourteen possible countries.

The voting

Just like in the adult version, the so-called ‚diaspora’ voting could be seen in the Junior contest:

• Greece and Cyprus gave each other the 12 points with Greece finishing third from last with 23 (+12 fixed) points and Cyprus being 8th with 46 (+12 fixed) points.
• Portugal got seven points from Spain, but reached only 10 points (+12) in total.
• Croatia got 10 points from Serbia and 12 from F.Y.R. Macedonia, which were by far the highest votes. Without that support, Croatia would have only scored 16 (+12 fixed) points and would have ranked definitely worse.

  Nevertheless, it should be noted that the countries that reached a high position would have obviously done well anyway – even without the support of their neighbours. Furthermore, some votes proved the opposite of ‘diaspora’ voting: Among others, F.Y.R. Macedonia was ignored by both Croatia and Serbia.

Running order / new voting system
The new voting system, which means that you can vote right after the show begins, was firstly introduced to give the countries that are early in the running order an equal chance to get votes. As it turns out this didn’t affect the results at all. Portugal, which performed first, finished second from last, Cyprus (performed second) finished 8th and the Netherlands, having started on third spot came fourth from last. On the other side, the countries that reached the top three were all presented in the second half of the running order with Russia being last.

Regarding the last victories in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest and the adult version, it is obvious that countries from eastern Europe have done very well: Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine have won the Contest as well as Croatia, Belarus and Russia did so in the Junior version. Russia finished second in 2000 and 2006 and achieved a third place in 2003. On the other hand, Slovenia and Belarus never made it through the semi final. Many people claim that has Eurovison already gone East. Or did they just have the better songs? Have your say!