Last year after the Contest I looked back at the 2021 jurors and – despite six countries’ jury votes being disqualified – this year I’m going to do the same.
The names of the those jurors, for Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino, were not published on the official list so they are not included in the information below.
As in 2021, some of the data is a bit messy – Cyprus’s jurors have no surnames provided, helpfully, and historical data is hit and miss – but we’ll do our best with what we have.
With 34 countries and 5 jurors each, that should leave us with 170 names, but in fact there are 171: one of the French semi-final jurors was replaced for the final (likely they became unavailable and one of the reserves stepped in).
- Of the 171 jurors, 26 had been jurors before. Rita Guerra was a juror in 1994 (and in between those 1994 and 2022 represented Portugal in 2003).
- 2 jurors had been on the panel twice before, in 2014 and 2017: Kaspars Ansons of Latvia and Michael Cederberg of Sweden.
- 7 jurors have written Eurovision songs. Of them, Maian Kärmas wrote a winning song (Estonia’s Everybody from 2001).
- 3 jurors had previously given their countries’ votes as spokespersons, all of them previous artists: Rasmussen, JOWST and 1993 winner Niamh Kavanagh.
- 2 jurors were artists who took part in 2021: Montaigne and Tusse.
- 2 jurors have been involved in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. Swedish juror Josefin Glenmark co-wrote San Marino’s 2015 JESC entry Mirror while Gaia Cauchi won the 2013 JESC for Malta with The Start.
- 26 jurors have taken part in national finals over the years, 12 of whom did not go on to perform at Eurovision. 6 took part in selection shows for the 2022 Contest: Spain’s Blanca Paloma, North Macedonia’s Yon Idy, Norway’s Mari Bølla, Croatia’s Mia Negovetić, Denmark’s DJ Speakr (from Fuld Effekt), and Czech Republic’s Annabelle.
While we’re here, let’s remind ourselves of the voting rules, which state that:
To increase diversity, music industry professionals can only take a seat in a national jury if they have not been in the jury during one of the previous two editions of the contest.
But according to the published data, Finland’s Amie Borgar and Lithuania’s Darius Uzkuraitis were jurors in 2021, while Belgium’s Alex Germys was listed as a juror in 2019 (there having been no edition in 2020). Hopefully there is a clerical error somewhere…