Introduction

Due to the fact that Azerbaijan has won the ESC last year, a lot of international attention will be gained in Eastern Europe. Therefore Belarus has initiated a generous national selection this year. The winning performance “All my life” sung by Alena Lanskaya has been chosen announced as Belorussian representative, but some weeks later everything has been cancelled. This arbitrariness is not the first time happened in Belarus with the winners of the national selection. Furthermore it’s a drama for the first chosen singer Alena; all of a sudden she is not going to Baku.

The replacement is the boy band Litesound “We are the heroes”. The modern rock tune might be more successful than a sad ballad, that’s what the organizers may have thought to recant Alena. In other countries this would be a big scandal, but here the people might used to this. Even though Litesound have to go the very strong second semi final.

History

Since 2004 Belarus takes part regularly in the Eurovision Song Contest. For the TV viewers, who only watch the grand final, they will have missed the majority of the Belarusian songs, because only two songs out of eight reached the final. Belarus has won the Junior ESC already, but in the original Eurovision Song Contest, the best place was the 6^th with “Work your magic” by Koldun in 2007. The second time Belarus has been voted into the final has been 2010 with “Butterflies” by 3+2 (25^th in the final). The votes mainly come from the former Soviet countries, but this recipe won’t always work to survive the qualification round.

The most outstanding songs were “My Galileo” by Aleksandra & Konstantin in 2004 (19^th in the semi final), “Love me tonight” by Angelica Argubash in 2005 (13^th in the semi final) and “I love Belarus” by Anastasia Vinnikova in 2011 (14^th in the semi final).