State Of The Nations

Written by Frank. Posted in Countdown, Melodifestivalen, Misc, National Finals

A quick round up of whats happening around Europe for the Eurovision selection process for those of ye that do not want to wade through dozens of articles. This weekend sees no more than 6 countries select their entrant Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Malta and Finland. If you are reading this website then you don’t need me to let you know whats happening in Ireland currently

Israel: Lets Start with the big news of the week, Dana International is back, she will participate in KDAM 2011 – the Israeli selection process. The full line up is as following:

KNOB - Ohev et ze (I’m loving that)

Dana International - Ding dong

Hatikva 6 - Hakol sababa (Everything is good)

Vladi Blayberg - Lirkod (To dance)

Chen Aharoni - Or (light)

Michael Greylsummer - Tu du du

Niki Goldstein - Amri itach (I’ll take off with you)

Sivan Bahnem - Kach oti (Take me)

Adi Cohen - Al ahava (About love)

Idit Halevi - It’s my time

The national final will be held on March 8th at 21:30 local time (20:30 CET)

Italy: RAI have confirmed the their entrant will in fact be from San Raemo, think of a pre cursor to Eurovision for Italians, and not X-Factor as was popularly rumored.

Germany: Lena has done 2 semi-finals and 6 songs have been selected for the German Final – more on that later.

Greece: Earlier today ERT aired 1 minute clips of each of the songs

Croatia: The 3 composers for DORA 2011 are: Lea Dekleva, Ante Pecoti?, and Boris ?ur?evi?.

The Croatian final will take place on March 5th.

Turkey: Yüksek Sadakat, the band selected to represent Turkey this year have confirmed that they have recorded 3 songs and an announced will be made within days. It has been described as Uptempo and in English.

Sweden: Despite a better than average song list, Melodifestivalen is facing strong criticism at home for not being that good, a recent poll showed 87% of viewers fed up with it, this is reflected in the viewing figures for last weeks ratings of 320k people, the lowest for a MF heat since the new format started several years ago. We will have more on the next heat and a round up on last weeks performance including Nanne Gronwalls disastrous attempt to become a diva.

Iceland: See here

Belgium: So the final is this weekend on Saturday in Liege, Belgium. All those entries that paid enough money have made it through to the final – well they had enough clicks on their web entry – that equated to Euros – whichever song got to €20,000 got through, weird but ok.

Eurovision 2011