The Swiss city of Basel will host Eurovision in 2025, as the song contest’s 69th edition returns to the country where it was born in 1956.
The Alpine republic won the right to host next year’s event after the Swiss artist Nemo won the 2024 contest with the song The Code.
The semi-finals and grand final will take place on 13, 15 and 17 May 2025 at the St Jakobshalle arena, a multi-purpose sport and music venue that can accommodate 12,400 spectators.
Basel, Switzerland’s third-largest city, beat off competition from Berne, Geneva and Zurich to host the world’s largest live music event. Municipal authorities in the city, which is located on a crook of the Rhine where France, Germany and Switzerland converge, centred their bid around the slogan “Crossing borders”.
“We are the most host-friendly city you can imagine”, claimed Conradin Cramer, the president of the government of the canton Basel-Stadt.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises the five-day contest, said it took into consideration about 100 criteria, such as facilities at the concert venue, local infrastructure and the ability to accommodate thousands of visiting delegations, crew, fans and journalists from around the world.
It will mark the sixth consecutive time that the competition has not been hosted in a capital city, and the first time the event has been held in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Previous Swiss host cities for Eurovision were Lugano in 1956 and Lausanne in 1989.
During the application process, a Christian conservative minority party, the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland (EDU), said it would seek to make use of the country’s direct democracy system to put the bidding cities’ loan applications to the vote in several cantons, including Basel.
If the call for a referendum on the event’s finance accumulates enough signatures, a referendum will be held towards the end of November, although a negative outcome for Eurovision fans is unlikely.
At a press conference on Friday, a spokesperson for Basel’s winning bid said he expected the song contest to create about 60m Swiss francs (£54m) in revenue for the city, a calculation based on a report on the economic benefits of Liverpool’s hosting of the event in 2023.
“The EBU is thrilled that Basel has been selected as the host city for the Eurovision song contest 2025”, said Martin Österdahl, the executive supervisor of the Eurovision song contest. “The contest was born in Switzerland in Lugano back in 1956 and it’s great to be bringing it back to its birthplace almost 70 years later.”
Eurovision was originally conceived in the mid-1950s as a technical experiment in simultaneous transnational TV broadcasting.
At this year’s event, Nemo became the first non-binary artist in Eurovision history to win the contest when they triumphed at the Malmö arena in May.
The 2024 contest was overshadowed by large-scale pro-Palestine protests in the Swedish city, as well as the last-minute disqualification of the Dutch contestant Joost Klein, after a camera operator accused him of “threatening” behaviour.
A Swedish investigation into Klein’s conduct was closed earlier this month, with prosecuting authorities saying they could not prove that “the act was capable of causing serious fear or that the man had any such intention”.
