Today, the rehearsals for the Grand Final of the sixty-second Eurovision Song Contest take place in Kyiv, Ukraine, the host city of this year’s edition.
Twenty-six countries will compete in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final, with 20 countries having qualified from two semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday night. As usual, five countries (dubbed the ‘big five’) have automatically qualified to the final, as the five countries that have contributed the most to the show financially – these five countries are joined by the host, Ukraine.
And so, the 26 finalists in this Saturday’s Grand Final will be split into the first and second halves as:
First half
- Armenia
- Austria
- Azerbaijan
- Belarus
- Croatia
- Denmark
- Hungary
- Israel
- Italy
- Moldova
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Portugal
Second Half
- Australia
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Cyprus
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Norway
- Romania
- Spain
- Sweden
- Ukraine (position 22)
- United Kingdom
The exact running order will be revealed during the course of the early hours of this morning.
Each broadcast show has three dress rehearsals. For the Grand Final, the first rehearsal begins at 15:00 local time, Ukraine, lasting 3 hours. The second matches the time of the actual broadcast, running from 22:00 until 01:30 local time.
The second of the two rehearsals is the jury rehearsal; this is where each entry will receive half of its votes. The juries from all of all of the 42 competing countries in this years contest will watch the performances and rank them from 1-26. These results will form 50% of the score on the Saturday night. The results of the jury vote will also influence the order in which the jury votes are announced on Saturday night to make it as tense as possible.
On Saturday night during the live Grand Final the public in all of the 42 competing countries excluding San Marino will vote. Their points will be combined to create an overall score for each country. These results are announced from 26th place to 1st place.
