Elina Nechayeva to represent Estonia at Eurovision 2018

Last night was a busy night for Eurovision fans with multiple countries selecting their representatives for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest. Estonia was one of these countries, with Elina Nechayeva winning their national selection show Eesti Laul. Elina’s song “La Forza” is completely different from any that have already been selected. It is a classical, operatic song, which showcases Elina’s vocals beautifully, and was written by Elina alongside Timo Vendt, Mihkel Mattisen and Ksenia Kuchukova.

Eesti Laul featured twenty acts in total across two semi-finals The top five from each semi-final then advanced to the grand final which took place last night in Tallinn. A fifty/fifty jury and public vote chose the top three in the contest who went on to perform again before the public solely chose Elina Nechayeva as the winner.

You can watch Elina Nechayeva perform “La Forza” below:

Estonia made its debut at the Eurovision Song Contest back in 1994. Since their debut, they have won the contest once, back in 2001 with “Everybody” performed by Tanel Padar, Dave Benton and 2XL. As well as this, they finished joint third in 2002 with Sahlene’s performance of “Runaway”. In the last couple of years, despite having artists who became fan favourites, Jüri Pootsmann in 2016 and Koit Toome and Laura in 2017, both failed to qualify for the final.

Estonia will be hoping they can break their recent trend and make it through to the grand final this year, however, they already have some tough competition. Other acts that have been announced so far are Sennek for Belgium, Saara Aalto for Finland, Waylon for the Netherlands, AISEL for Azerbaijan, Cesar Sampson for Austria, Jessica Mauboy for Australia, Eugent Bushpepa for Albania, Iriao for Georgia, Madame Monsieur for France, Julia Samoylova for Russia, Alfred & Amaia for Spain, Mikolas Josef for the Czech Republic, Ryan O’Shaughnessy for Ireland, Eleni Foureira for Cyprus, Christabelle for Malta, Zibbz for Switzerland, SuRie for the United Kingdom, Rasmussen for Denmark, Ermal Meta and Fabrizio Moro for Italy, Eye Cue for F.Y.R Macedonia, Franka for Croatia, Netta Barzilai for Israel, Gianna Terzi for Greece, Alekseev for Belarus, Vanja Radovanovic for Montenegro, Sanja Ilic and Balkanika for Serbia, Michael Schulte for Germany, DoReDos for Moldova,  AWS for Hungary, Mélovin for Ukraine, Laura Rizzotto for Latvia, Lea Sirk for Slovenia, The Humans for Romania, Sevak Khanagyan for Armenia and Ari Ólafsson for Iceland.

The Eurovision Song Contest 2018 will be hosted at the Altice Arena, Lisbon, Portugal; with the two Semi-Finals taking place on 8 May and 10 May and the Grand Final taking place on 12 May. A total of 43 countries will compete in the contest.

Finally, don’t forget to let us know your thoughts on Estonia’s selection of Elina Nechayeva for this year’s Eurovision. You can tweet us your thoughts on Twitter @CelebMix.

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