Eurovision 2026: Semi-Final 1 Jury Results Analysis
Alicja from Poland won the jury vote in this year's first semi-final. (photo: Sarah Louise Bennett/EBU) When national juries were reintroduced to Eurovision in 2009, their influence was largely restricted to the Grand Final, with their only job in the semi-finals being to select a ‘wildcard’ qualifier from the countries that did not finish within the televote’s top nine. The main result of this was that North Macedonia failed to qualify for the final for two consecutive years, despite finishing tenth with the European public on both occasions. In 2010, this method of calculating the results was scrapped in favour of the 50/50 system, which remained in place until 2023, when the juries were removed from the semi-finals once again following the previous year’s collusion scandal. Between 2023 and 2025, the qualifiers were decided solely by the televote – something that I and many others in the Eurovision fandom community were not happy about. So it’s fair to say that I was quite p...