Tonight, the Greek national final for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest will be held. Sakis Rouvas performs all three songs and then it will be decided, which of them is going to be the 30th Greek entry in the competition. For the first time, the readers of esctoday.com can take part in the voting process as part of the international jury.

The show

The show to be broadcast on ERT and ERT World will start at 22:00 local time (21:00 CET) and it will be hosted by Betty & Mathilde Maggira at the Athinon Arena Music Hall in Athens. Sakis Rouvas will perform all three songs and the winner will be chosen by televoting (60%) and a jury (40%), which includes the votes of the esctoday.com voters (read more below). Many representatives from other countries will appear in the gala show: Chiara from Malta with What if we, Jade from the United Kingdom with It's my time, Petr Elfimov from Belarus with Eyes that never lie, Christina Metaxas from Cyprus with Firefly and Hadise from Turkey with Düm tek tek.

Your opinion counts

Readers are invited to vote for their favourite song in a special poll now. Greek readers cannot vote in the poll. They will have the opportunity to vote in the televote, worth 40% of the result in the final. The international result will be delivered by Stella Floras, as one seventh of the jury vote.

• Vote here.
• Find out more about the voting here.

Back-up voting locations

Should esctoday.com crash or be unavailable due to the amount of traffic coming to the site, you will be able to vote via our back-up page on Blogger here (www.esctodaycom.blogspot.com)or votevia our myspace page here (www.myspace.com/esctoday). Once again, the voting will not allow people to vote more than once, whereever they log in from.

Webcast

The show will be streamed live on eurovision.tv hereand by ERT here. Octoshape plugin required for both webcasts.

Entries

Composer/lyricist in brackets.

1. Out of control (Dimitris Kontopoulos/Alexandra Zakka)
2. Right on time (Dimitris Kontopoulos/Craig Porteils, Cameron Giles-Webb)
3. This is our night (Dimitris Kontopoulos/Craig Porteils, Cameron Giles-Webb)

Greece has been one of the most succesful countries in the Eurovision Song Contest in recent years not finishing outside the top ten since 2003. In 2008, Kalomoira won the first semi final and finished third in the final in Belgrade with her entry Secret combination. In 2009, the country will take part in the second semi final on 14th March.

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