🎤 Eurovision 2026: When 'Want' Took Over from 'Love'

It's that time of year again — the Eurovision Song Contest returns this week for its 70th edition, this time hosted by Vienna after JJ's win for Austria with Wasted Love last year. The 70th anniversary makes 2026 a milestone edition, and 35 countries are competing across two semi-finals and a Grand Final at the Wiener Stadthalle.

📅 Don't miss it!

• Semi-Final 1: 12 May, 21:00 CEST

• Semi-Final 2: 14 May, 21:00 CEST

• Grand Final: 16 May, 21:00 CEST

  
  

Stream it live on Eurovision's official YouTube channel — and yes, you can rewatch all past performances there too!

💡 One year on: what's changed in the lyrics?

Last year I shared a piece on what 10 years of Eurovision lyrics reveal — a project I've been developing with my co-authors Alessia Morrone, Barbara Będowska-Sójka, Sabrina Giordano, and Claudia Tarantola. The headline finding was simple and beautiful: from 2015 to 2025, love sat at the top of Eurovision's lyrical chart almost every year, with only the pandemic editions of 2021 and 2022 breaking the pattern.

With the 2026 entries now public, I've extended the dataset to include all 35 songs in this year's competition. Same pipeline as before — lyrics translated into English, then text and sentiment analysis. Same question: which words steal the spotlight in 2026?

🌈 The 2026 word cloud

🧠 Insight: For the first time in the last years of data, love is no longer #1. The most-used word in Eurovision 2026 is want (81 mentions across 35 songs), with love close behind at 69 mentions. The top 10 also features know, time, night, life, dancing, pray, mother, and heart — a darker, more longing-coded vocabulary than the romantic chorus we saw in 2024 and 2025. New entrants this year include lying, sad, and inside, reflecting more introspective, vulnerable songwriting across the continent.

🔥 The favourite is the outlier

Bookmakers have a clear pick this year: Finland — Linda Lampenius & Pete Parkkonen with Liekinheitin ("Flamethrower") — with an implied 34% chance of winning. Greece, Denmark, France, and Australia complete the top 5. The OGAE fan poll and Eurojury also picked Finland first, so all three signals agree on the winner.

But here's what makes it interesting from a lyrics perspective: applying VADER sentiment analysis to all 35 entries, Finland is the most negative song in the entire competition (compound score −0.98). The other four top-5 favourites cluster between +0.97 and +0.99. Finland sits alone in negative territory among the contenders.

⛈ The favourites converge: love, time, night, heart, kiss, home — the classic Eurovision palette, sung over and over across France, Australia, Romania, Italy. The outsiders diverge: each song reaches for its own world — Poland's prayers, Estonia's thunder, Austria's dance permit, Portugal's rain, San Marino's honey. Bookmakers have a preference, and it shows up in vocabulary as much as in odds: converge to win, diverge to lose.

If Finland wins on Saturday, it will be the second year running that a song about painful, unrequited longing takes the trophy — last year's Wasted Love was an "ocean of love" drowning in absence; this year's favourite is built around fire, ice, sin, and obsession. Eurovision in 2026 is feeling its feelings.

🎭 What is each country singing about?

Beyond raw word counts, I tagged each song against eight themes: love, body/dance, home/identity, spiritual, darkness, materialism, war/peace, and joy/party. The result is a country-by-country thematic map of the 2026 contest:

A few things jumped out:

• France, Australia, Romania wrote the most concentrated love songs of the year.

• Finland and Sweden lean heavily into body/dance — fire, skin, heat, cold.

• Greece's Ferto is pure materialism — crowns, thrones, diamonds, yachts — and almost nothing else.

• Luxembourg wrote a song about home/identity ("Mother Nature"); Poland wrote one about faith ("Pray").

• Norway's Ya ya ya stands alone in the war/peace column — broken bones, fighting, falling apart.

  
  

❤️ Will love win again in 2026?

In 2025 I closed the post by asking whether the winning song would still contain love. JJ's Wasted Love delivered the answer in the title.

In 2026 the question is sharper: the bookmaker favourite has zero love words at all. If Finland wins, love disappears from the winning lyrics for the first time since 2022 (Kalush Orchestra's Stefania, which was about a mother, not a romantic partner).

So next Saturday I'll be watching with a question I genuinely don't know the answer to: does Eurovision still want a love song to win, or has the mood shifted? Stay tuned — and keep an eye (an ear) on the lyrics 😊.

As always, more Eurovision insights coming soon — including the post-final review, where we'll see whether want beat love not just in the lyrics, but on the scoreboard.

Until then… let the best song (and maybe the best longing) win 🎶.