title image source: SVT

SongHunt 2025, our search to find the best non-winning song of the national final season, has concluded – and the winner is “This Dream Of Mine” by Arwin from Sweden!

In an exciting interactive event in our chatroom tonight, we watched all 12 finalists before casting the votes that would combine with the public poll to determine the overall winner.

Our public poll attracted votes from 29 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 in order as follows:

As you can see, Kristy Spiteri‘s lead from the public poll evaporated in the face of relatively low chatroom support. That opened the door for Diana Vilarinho’s “Cotovia” to take second place – but she couldn’t quite outscore Arwin, the underdog from Sweden who didn’t even make it to the Melodifestivalen final but who won the hearts of our chatroom regulars and our public voters!

The final standings looked like this:

Arwin duly succeeds Germany’s Marie Reim as the reigning champion 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 once again to Arwin and – of course – this post has to conclude with the winning song one more time. So here it is, in the adorably low-budget music video we have also grown to love here at escgo!