Romanian broadcaster TVR has announced that submissions for Selecţia Naţională 2022 will be purely online, and will be open from today until 19th December 2021.

Artists, songwriters and composers wishing to take part must send their submissions to eurovision.romania@tvr.ro.

The rules and regulations, and further information about the format, can be found here.

“I hope that the return to Selecţia Naţională will be auspicious, and the best artists will take advantage of this opportunity to try and represent Romania at Eurovision. We will be intensely promoting the opening of entries, including among music schools and production houses. Also,we have been waiting for projects made by composers from abroad, in order to increase thevolume of registrations and, implicitly, the level of competition”

(Iuliana Marciuc, Producer at TVR)

The calendar for Romania’s preselection looks like this:

• 26th November – 19th December 2021 – Sumbission of entries
• 21st – 22nd December 2021 – Selection of semi-finalists by panel of internal jury members at TVR
• 23rd December 2021 – Announcement of 45 pre-selected songs for the semi-finals

From here, the voting format will be slightly different. From each of the semi-finals, which will take place through February 2022, five finalists will be selected by a combination of jury and public votes, which will be made via the Eurovision Romania Facebook page.

In the Grand Final, due to be held on 5th March 2022, the top 20 songs will perform again, and the winner will be selected by a combination of jury votes and public televotes. Like previous iterations, the public vote score will have the same weight as the score given by a single juror.

The last time Selecţia Naţională was held in a multi-participant format was in 2019, when Ester Peony won with On A Sunday, despite coming 8th in the public vote, over 4,200 votes behind Laura Bretan. She finished 13th in the second Semi-Final in Tel Aviv and failed to qualify.

Romania will be hoping to use next year’s Selecţia Naţională to aid in their first qualification for the Grand Final since 2017, an astonishing thought considering they’d qualified on every single attempt up until that point. Last year, Amnesia by Roxen failed to reignite the Romanian flame of old, despite finishing 9th with the juries in the first Semi-Final in Rotterdam.

In July, TVR held a televised debate, Eurovision, pe şleau! (Eurovision, By the Way!), moderated by Romanian Head of Delegation Marina Almăşan, with the aim of finding out why Romania’s top artists were not participating in Eurovision, why interest levels in Romania have decreased and how this can be rectified in future.

Are you excited about the return of Selecţia Naţională? Who would you like to see represent Romania? Let us know in the comments and on social media.