Junior Eurovision 2024 — My rankings

I ranked the seventeen contestants in Junior Eurovision 2024 during the live show today, before the public vote opened. (Or re-opened; they allowed early voting before the show.)

As ever with the contest, this is my opinion of the songs and staging, not the kids themselves; they all did great.

The United Kingdom did not compete this year. Instead we got Cyprus and San Marino, which hadn’t participated since 2017 and 2015 respectively.

1. 🇪🇸 Spain — Chloe DelaRosa — Como La Lola ^{(footnote 1)}
2. 🇵🇹 Portugal — Victoria Nicole — Esperança
3. 🇫🇷 France — Titouan — Comme ci comme ça
4. 🇦🇲 Armenia — Leo — Cosmic Friend
5. 🇺🇦 Ukraine — Artem Kotenko — HEAR ME NOW
6. 🇮🇹 Italy — Simone Grande — Pigiama Party ^{(footnote 2)}
7. 🇪🇪 Estonia — ANNABELLE — Tänavad
8. 🇲🇹 Malta — Ramires Sciberras — Stilla Ċkejkna
9. 🇩🇪 Germany — Bjarne — Save The Best For Us
10. 🇬🇪 Georgia — Andria Putkaradze — To My Mom ^{(footnote 3)}
11. 🇮🇪 Ireland — Enya Cox Dempsey — Le Chéile
12. 🇦🇱 Albania — Nikol Çabeli — Vallëzoj
13. 🇲🇰 North Macedonia — Ana and Aleksej — Marathon
14. 🇨🇾 Cyprus — Maria Pissarides — Crystal Waters ^{(footnote 4)}
15. 🇵🇱 Poland — Dominik Arim — All Together ^{(footnote 5)}
16. 🇸🇲 San Marino — Idols SM — Come Noi
17. 🇳🇱 Netherlands — Stay Tuned — Music

Footnotes

1. 🇪🇸 Last year’s flag parade used the Jain song “Makeba”, which was a tribute to Miriam Makeba. This year the host country wrote an entire song about a titaness of music, Lola Flores. And the contest’s slogan this year is “Let’s Bloom”, which fits with Flores’ surname! She’s really getting her flowers.
2. 🇮🇹 Trampoline bed!
3. 🇬🇪 The lyrics are quite poetic, comparing maternal love to the sun, sky, and snow. The snow is described as pink. Let’s assume it makes more sense in Georgian.
4. 🇨🇾 Weirdly enough for a song about waters, the dance-break and some of the graphics were more “Fuego” (Cyprus’s song from adult Eurovision 2018).
5. 🇵🇱 I imagine the “Let’s Bloom” slogan is why Poland’s lyric is, “I’m not afraid to bloom like a flower.” But Albania out-flower-powered them with a song about dancing with a flower. Take that, Poland. You’ll have to make do with second place in terms of flower allusions (or third if we count Chloe DelaRosa having a rose in her name and singing about Flores). 🌹