SongHunt 2023, our search to find the best non-winning song of the national final season, has concluded – and the winner is “Evita” by Elsa Lila from Albania!

In an exciting interactive event in our chatroom tonight, we watched all 15 finalists before casting the votes that would combine with the public poll to determine the overall winner.

Our public poll attracted well over 600 votes from 31 different countries – a huge thank you to everyone who took part! Those numbers allowed us to divide the public vote into five regional juries in order to ramp up the drama even more. This is how the public voted:

Then it was time for our chatters to have their say. Like in ESC, we converted their points into the “televoting” 50% of the final result, which we presented them in order as follows:

(Please ignore the slight glitch affecting the score for “Arcadia” – we promise it’s correct in the image of the final standings at the bottom of this post!)

As you can see, Agoney’s lead from the public poll wasn’t enough to help him stay ahead of Elsa Lila after she received a huge vote from our chatters during the live show – and, indeed, “Quiero arder” slipped down to 3rd place overall as Kuumaa from Finland eventually took the silver medal.

The final standings looked like this:

Elsa Lila duly succeeds Rigoberta Bandini and joins the illustrious ranks of the SongHunt winners over the years. If you want to read more about the event’s history, you can do so right here!

Congratulations to Elsa Lila and – of course – this post has to conclude with the winning song one more time. So here it is!