Eurovision Countdown 2025: Switzerland is trying

Switzerland
Zoë Më – Voyage

Hosting Eurovision once is exciting. Hosting it twice in a row? That’s how broadcasters end up selling off studio lights and rehearsing camera angles in a Tesco car park. Enter Switzerland’s 2025 offering: Voyage by Zoë Më—a song that is, quite clearly, designed not to win. And honestly? That’s fair.

Last year’s victory was one of those rare Eurovision moments where the blind squirrel finds the nut, after years of entries ranging from the quietly competent to the politely ignored. So this year, Switzerland has wisely opted for a low-risk, high-quality French ballad. It’s contemporary, it’s classy, and it’s in no danger of setting fire to the scoreboard or the stage.

Zoë Më, who describes herself as a “little fairy” despite being 1.80 metres tall (perhaps the Swiss definition of “little” is more liberal), brings a quiet charisma to the track. She delivers a gently poetic performance in French, with a breathy vocal that lands somewhere between modern chanson and polite indie-pop. There’s a musical intelligence at work here, too—subtle motifs, restrained production flourishes, and a sense of narrative that doesn’t lean too hard on cliché.

And then, of course, there’s that bit. The tempo change. The one that’s become almost mandatory this year, like someone at the EBU sent round a memo demanding each song include a 20-second rhythmic identity crisis. In Voyage, the shift feels a little forced—like an afterthought aimed at keeping up with trendier entries, and it interrupts what had been a lovely build. The ending, once so promising, drifts out rather than landing with impact. A shame, but not fatal.

Still, it’s hard to be cross with this. In a field full of forced gimmicks and structural chaos, Voyage is welcome—a soft, sincere sigh of a song that exists purely to remind us that yes, Switzerland has taste. It won’t win. But it doesn’t need to. All it has to do is behave itself, look good under tasteful lighting, and keep the hosts from getting nervous.

7 points (and a grateful nod for not sending another power ballad with a man on a rotating cube)