The Norwegian Alexander Rybak, with a huge share of all votes, took the first place at the musical competition “Eurovision”, fascinating whole Europe with his “fairytale”. Unfortunately, the predictions didn’t come true. Sakis Rouvas’s “This is our night” took 7^th position with 120 votes. Bulgaria also contributed for his climbing up, giving its maximum of 12 points to the Greek pop idol.

The second place, by a large margin to the first one, was for Iceland and Yohanna with “Is it true?” Until the last minute, Iceland was leading a close competition with “Always”, Azerbaijan, performed by the dark beauty AySel and Arash, who ended up on third position.

Most of the votes Greece got came from their neighbors, Bulgaria and Albania, and Cyprus. Deserved appreciation Sakis also received from Romania, Armenia, Malta, Croatia and Serbia, as well as 12 other countries. Greece, on the other hand, gave 8 points to Azerbaijan, 10- to Norway, and 12- to the United Kingdom.

Sakis’s performance was loudly applauded, but unfortunately, the prognoses placing him among the first ten, did not come true. However, the vote of 90mln people is truly unpredictable, which actually brings the thrill about this competition.

This year the voting procedure has been altered. The vote of every country was calculated by adding two equal parts: the first one consisting of the sum of votes of a newly-formed commission, and the other- consisting of the votes of the audience. This decision was reached as a result of the past few years’ tendency among Eastern-European countries to vote for each-other by the “neighbor’s” law, which moved the competition in one part of Europe. The organizers now believe that more diversity and fairness will be provided for the performers.

The procedure fallowed by the judges, whose votes form 50% of that of the country, is as fallows: each judge makes a list of the ten performances he considers to be the best. Then he assigns points according to the Eurovision point system (from 1-8, 10, 12). The lists of the five members of each commission form 50% of the result of each country.

It is of interest, that during economic crisis the countries were quite generous with the money spent on the promotion of their representatives and on the organization of the event itself, which budget jumped with another 10mln euro this year. Greece’s participation costs the state 900 000 euro, and the competition arrangement at Moscow’s “Olympiyski” came out at 31,5mln euro.

The excited Rybak was presented with the award by last year’s winner, Dima Bilan, and the woman who was the first one to win Eurovision, whose song, 57 years ago, could only be heard on radio.