The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest is set to take place next month in Basel, Switzerland, and a total of 37 countries will compete in this year’s edition. After announcing the running order for the Semi Finals (which was done by the producers, the same way as in the past years), the EBU has now confirmed that they are introducing a change for the Grand Final – the running order will once again be decided by a random draw.

Switzerland was drawn to perform 17th at the Heads of Delegations meeting last month at random. Now the remaining participating countries will no longer draw “first half”, “second half” or “producers’ choice”, but they will be drawing the exact running order number which they will perform under. This method was used until 2013.

The Big Five will be drawing their running order positions live during the Semi Finals in which they will be performing, whilst the qualifiers from each Semi Final will do so at the winners’ press conference. The Executive Supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest, Mr. Martin Osterdahl stated:

The EBU hopes that this will bring more excitement to the show, and make it more difficult to the viewers to predict who finished where in the Semi Finals, but also to give the number 02 finally a better chance at victory in Eurovision.

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