Skip to main content

It's Eric Saade for Sweden!

12 March 2011 at 22:52 CET

The Swedish Melodifestivalen is the biggest show in television in Sweden. A tour through five towns and the final in the impressive Globe Arena makes it also the most ambitious national selection in Europe. This year it celebrated the tenth year on tour and ten were the finalists competing for the trophy tonight. These are the final results:

  1. Eric Saade - Popular (Fredrik Kempe) (193p)
  2. Danny - In The Club (Fredrik Boström, Peter Boström & Danny Saucedo) (149p)
  3. The Moniker - Oh My God! (The Moniker) (124p)
  4. Sanna Nielsen - I'm In Love (Irini Michas, Peter Boström, Thomas G:son, Bobby Ljunggren) (114p)
  5. Swingfly - Me And My Drum (Teron Beal, Patrik Magnusson, Johan Ramström & Swingfly) (93p)
  6. The Playtones - The King (Fredrik Kempe & Peter Kvint) (79p)
  7. Linda Bengtzing - E Det Fel På Mig (Pontus Assarsson, Thomas G:son, Jörgen Ringkvist & Daniel Barkman) (58p)
  8. Nicke Borg - Leaving Home (Jojo Borg Larsson, Nicke Borg, Fredrik Thomander & Anders Wikström) (57p)
  9. Sara Varga - Spring För Livet (Sara Varga & Fredrik Böstrom) (50p)
  10. Brolle - 7 Days And 7 Nights (Brolle) (29p)

The media had been mentioning many of the participants as potential winners - with Danny and Eric Saade getting most of the attention as the main favourites with their uptempo disco-pop entries. They weren't wrong, it was Eric Saade who won the competition with Popular while Danny came second with In The Club. Dark horse The Moniker reached the third place with the song Oh My God! in spite of coming from the second chance round.

The main difference this year was in the voting system: an international jury sitting in eleven different countries counted for half of the final result, the other half being the results of the Swedish televote. The televote points were distributed by the percentage of votes that the songs have collected instead of a fixed set of votes. Both the international jury and the Swedish public had Eric as the winner and Danny as the runner-up.

Sweden first took part in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1958 and have won four times since then, the last one being in 1999 in Jerusalem with Charlotte Nilsson's Take Me To Your Heaven. Eric will try to be the fifth, but first he will have to get through the second semifinal of the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest in Düsseldorf on the 12th of May.