After a 5-times winner at my #18, we have a 5-times winner at my #17, and it’s a country we haven’t seen at Eurovision since 1993, when I was just 15… They were present at Eurovision’s first contest and despite being out of the contest for over 30 years, Luxembourg still sit high in that table of all-time wins. Their return this year means it is also the first time since 1993 we have all seven of Eurovision’s inaugural countries competing. What awaits Luxembourg and their artist Tali in their first foray into 2020s Eurovision, and reliant on public votes for the first time?

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Tali Golergant is a Luxembourgish singer, songwriter, actress and vocal coach – she’s a citizen of the world, having been born in Israel to an Israeli mother and Peruvian Jewish father. After Israel, the family lived in Chile and Argentina, before settling in Luxembourg while Tali was still young, and is where she grew up. She got involved in music and theatre as a child and then moved to New York to study musical theatre at higher education college and the city is still her home today. She’s released both a single and album, and has performed both as a singer and acted in theatre around New York. She was a competing artist in Luxembourg’s national selection for Eurovision, and in the superfinal won the jury vote, and was one point off the public vote winner.

As with all the entries in the national final, the artists were given a song rather than singing their own creation. “Fighter” comes from a mostly French or France-based team of songwriters and composers and is a bilingual girlie-bop, mixing both French and English. I think that is one of the elements that makes this stand out for me and raises it above most of the other girl bops in this year’s contest. You don’t often get this sort of song/genre in French, and there are a few other flourishes in this that appeal. It’s no groundbreaker admittedly, but there’s enough here to provide entertainment.

Luxembourg have been rewarded for their return with the honour of closing semi-final 1, and means that the song most similar to this in the line up, Cyprus, bookends the semi-final as the opener. “Fighter” has had a mixed reception in the fandom, sitting in the 20s in the scoreboard app. Looking at the semi-final only option, it looks like Tali would qualify based on those votes and when looking at the betting at the moment, the qualification odds look even stronger.

The running order place does help this a lot and I think that is a very deliberate act to help Luxembourg qualify on their return after so long away. I think it’s definitely plausible that this will qualify, but I think Tali just needs to be mindful of the live vocal. It’s not that she doesn’t have the vocal ability – at LEP she performed a very competent cover of “Hold Me Closer”, but she clearly was a bit out of breath by the end of the performance of “Fighter” in the national final – it’s got dance moves and some more challenging vocal parts. I’m sure she will have been working on that in the weeks running up to Eurovision – and whether that will bring the first appearance by Luxembourg in the grand final since 1993.

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Luxembourg in the Eurovision Song Contest