Romania brings home unexpected third position at Eurovision

Romanian duo Paula Seling and Ovi’s song, “Playing with Fire” ( watch below), won third place at the 2010 European Song Contest Eurovision. The first place was taken up by German Lena’s Satellite, which gathered 246 points. Turkish rock group maNga came in second, with 170 points, only 6 points apart from Romania, the third ranked.

With critics either applauding the song or snubbing it, well-known Romanian singer and Norway-based Ovi took to the stage, offering the eager public a flawless performance. After having ranked 19 in 2009 with Elena Gheorghe’s “Balkan Girls”, Romania’s odds were not regarded with optimism, yet Paula Seling has declared, upon her return to the Romanian capital, “We focused on our background. I hope everyone saw the amount of work put in by us, I hope you were pleased with us.”

At this year’s Eurovision edition, Romania gathered 162 points, of which twelve were from Moldova, ten from Spain, Sweden, Norway and Portugal, and eight from Denmark, Great Britain, Cyprus and Israel. Compared to the 2005 edition, when Romanian singer Luminita Anghel and percussions band, Sistem, had ranked third, the highest position for Romania in Eurovision’s history, this year, although the rank was identical, the number of points was higher – 162, compared to 158.

There were 39 participants at this year’s Eurovision edition, 20 of which had qualified from the two semi-finals, while host nation Norway and the so-called ‘Big Four’ – France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom – were automatically set for the final. Participant countries are members of the European Broadcasting Union, or EBU, founded in 1950, and currently including non-European members, such as Morocco and Israel.

The element of innovation, this year, was the presence of a specialized panel formed of national juries, which accounted for 50 percent of the final results. The European song competition is one of the most watched shows in the world, with an estimated audience of 120 million viewers. The Norwegian television channel, NRK, is reported to have spent 25 million Euro in order to finance the musical show and therefore had to give up the broadcasting rights for the Football World Cup, much to the dismay of football-loving Norwegians.