The EBU has just announced that what many fans longingly look out for every year, the semi-final allocation draw, will be taking place on Tuesday the 31st of January. The draw will take place at 11:00 CET in the column hall of Kyiv’s City State Administration.
This is also when the handing over of the Host City Insignia, which annually represents the hosting going from one country to another, by symbolically handing over these ”keys”. This year they will go from the president of Stockholm’s City Council Eva-Louise Erlandsson Slorach to Vitaliy Klychko, the mayor of Kyiv.
As always, the participating countries have been drawn in pots, based on previous voting patterns, of which approximately half of the pot will go to one semi-final, he other half to the other one. This has been done to reduce the effect of friendly-, neighbour- and diaspora voting on the semi-final results.
The pot division is as following this year:
Pot 1
Albania
F.Y.R. Macedonia
Montenegro
Slovenia
Croatia
Serbia
Switzerland
Pot 2
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Iceland
Estonia
Sweden
Pot 3
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Georgia
Russia
Israel
Pot 4
Hungary
Cyprus
Greece
Romania
Moldova
Bulgaria
Pot 5
Portugal
Australia
Czech Republic
Malta
Austria
San Marino
Pot 6
Belgium
The Netherlands
Ireland
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
The Big 5 countries (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain) and the hosting country Ukraine are not part of these pots because they are qualified to the final directly and the first part of next Tuesday’s draw will be dedicated to determine which semi-final they wil be broadcasting and voting in.
German broadcaster ARD has requested to get assigned the second semi-final, which has been allowed by the Reference Group.
Another, by the Reference Group accepted, request is the one from Swiss broadcaster SRF to participate in the second semi-final. It has been announced that this will bring semi-final two’s total at 19 countries, semi-final one’s at 18.
The allocation draw will be available to be watched from this link(Click!) next Tuesday and will be covered by ESCBubble.
We hope you’ll be tuning in to follow it with us!
