Romania in the Eurovision Song Contest 2012
Open-knowledge reference entry
Romania was represented at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 with the song "Zaleilah" written by Elena Ionescu, Costi Ioniță and Omar Secada. The song was performed by the band Mandinga. The Romanian broadcaster Televiziunea Română (TVR) organised the national final Selecția Națională 2012 in order to select the Romanian entry for the 2012 contest in Baku, Azerbaijan. Fifteen entries were selected to compete in the national final on 10 March 2012 where "Zaleilah" performed by Mandinga was selected as the winner after scoring top marks from a nine-member jury panel and a public televote.
Romania was drawn to compete in the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest which took place on 22 May 2012. Performing during the show in position 6, "Zaleilah" was announced among the top 10 entries of the first semi-final and therefore qualified to compete in the final on 26 May. It was later revealed that Romania placed third out of the 18 participating countries in the semi-final with 120 points. In the final, Romania performed in position 14 and placed twelfth out of the 26 participating countries, scoring 71 points.
Background
Prior to the 2012 contest, Romania had participated in the Eurovision Song Contest 13 times since its first entry in 1994. To this point, its highest placing in the contest has been third place, which the nation achieved on two occasions: in 2005 with the song "Let Me Try" performed by Luminița Anghel and Sistem, and in 2010 with the song "Playing with Fire" performed by Paula Seling and Ovi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Romania in the Eurovision Song Contest 2012” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.