In a night of relative upsets, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia are out of Eurovision 2013, as The Netherlands return to Saturday night for the first time since 2004.
Eurovision always turns up some exciting stories, and the first semi final certainly matched up to those expectations. We always predicted there would be some disappointments in the results along with the ten happy qualifiers.
The two stand-out stories from that list are the return of the Netherlands, and the missing Balkans.
By getting herself a slot on the Saturday night, Anouk can declare ‘Mission Accomplished’ for the central European country, which last won the contest in 1975. There’ll be a lot of her supporters daring to dream that this might chance, but another 25 countries might have something to say about that.
The loss of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro is more interesting. It could be that the new voting system has kept the cultural block vote intact, but with less of an effect on the final results. The new voting system was going to be most noticeable in the 7-13th places, so it would not surprise us to see those countries with a similar points score just a few points away from the vital tenth place.
The full list of qualifiers are
Belarus, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Moldova The Netherlands, Russia, and Ukraine
And the six non-qualifiers are
Austria, Croatia, Cyrpus, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
With the new running order rules, the qualifiers draw out the first half or the second half of the running order, with SVT to recommend a running order to the EBU after the second semi-final. Here are the results of the position draw:
First Half: Estonia, Russia, Netherlands, Belgium, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania.
Second Half: Denmark, Ukraine, Ireland.
I predict a huge headache for the producers of the show.
It will be a minefield
I can’t wait for the scores to be revealed – I can’t for the life of me imagine how all the countries are ranked. The former Yugoslav countries might have taken points away from each other because none of them was strong enough to get the majority of votes from the rest.
I wonder if FYROM can prevent the total blackout, but I have my doubts. If they manage to slip through though, they could maybe benefit massively from being the only of the FYRs in the final.
Montenegro put in an excellent performance. Such a shame they weren’t rewarded for it.
Shame Croatia didn’t get through. Lovely song, beautifully sung. Pity they chose to put that cheesy synth track on it, making it sound like lift (elevator) music. They like that sound in Croatia, or at least they appear to as every hotel bar I’ve ever visited in Croatia seems to have that sound playing everywhere you go. Sounds like a Roland organ from the 70s. Detracted from a beautiful song.
i wonder where the Yugo votes on saturday will go to now.
And it is good to see that Serbia can fail.
I was happy overall with the result although I wanted Slovenia over Estonia and Montenegro over Lithuania which was a shock qualifier for me as the performance was meh!