Newsflash 2

So what ESC news do we have …?

Well, no finals for the past few days but there have been some moves towards finals which will take place later on in the month

Firstly the EBU have announced that a total of 43 countries have applied to go to Baku in May. This means that 37 countries will contest the semi-finals but only 20 will get through to the final (the big 5 and Azerbaijan go through the final automatically)

 The 6 acts and songs going forward to the Dutch preselection were unveiled, as were the 10 entries for the Danish national final.
The Latvians have had their two semi-finals and now have whittled down their final to just 10 songs which will once again be voted for on February 18th.
The Icelandic preselection is now underway. The first of the 3 semis occurred last week with just 2 songs going through for a list of 5.
The three songs Ivi Adamou will be singing in the Cypriot final were released on 6th January. The songs (2 up tempo electronic numbers and one ballad) will be voted for on January 25th by a mixture of an expert jury and televoting.
The Slovene selection is one step from the end! The Misija Evrovisija shows started back in October but on 8th January the last two acts were selected. Going through to the EMA 2012 on February 26th will be solo artist Eva Noto and duo Nika & Eva Prushnik.
The 20 names and songs in the running fir the Hungarian ticket have also been announced. They will have to endure 2 semi finals before the final on 11th February.
A few weeks ago the list of names for the Austrian preselection were announced and last week 8 of the 10 songs were unveiled in a concert in Vienna
“Unser Star fuer Baku” started last week. This is the second edition of the successful process that catapulted Lena to victory in Oslo in 2010. he first 10 hopefuls were whittled down to 5. On Thursday another fresh batch of 10 will go down to 5.
Romania’s future in the contest this year seems to be bleak. The Romanian TV company has announced a monetary crisis and it is still unclear as to how (or if) they will appear in Baku. An internal selection concerning the dance pop singer Inna fell through and they are not sure if they can afford to produce a selection procedure. Their name is on the list for Baku but they will have to decide soon before the draw at the end of the month.