The Festival

The "Eurovision Song Contest" is an international song competition that takes places in Europe every month of may since 1956. At the beginning were only seven countries but, currently, 41 nations are participating in this celebration of music and diversity. The event is followed and broadcasted for more than 100 millions of viewers all around the world, becoming a key day for almost every single person in Europe.

During the twentieth century the festival consisted only of the day of the final, in which all participating countries sang, but after the end of the Cold War during the 90s, the number of countries was slightly higher than before and since 2004 only 26 countries can perform in the Grand Final, the rest has to pass a previous selection during the semifinals (where 10 finalists countries are chosen in each of them) except for the Big 6:

Spain
Italy
France
Germany
United Kingdom
(The host country of that year)

These countries have direct access to the final because they are the biggest contributors of the Festival.

How is the winner chosen?

According to eurovision.tv:

"The voting systems used in the Contest have changed throughout the years. The modern system has been in place since 1975. Voters award a set of points from 1 to 8, then 10 and finally 12 to songs from other countries — with the favourite being awarded the now famous douze points. Historically, a country's set of votes was decided by an internal jury, but in 1997 five countries experimented with televoting, giving members of the public in those countries the opportunity to vote en masse for their favourite songs. The experiment was a success and from 1998 all countries were encouraged to use televoting wherever possible."

So, basically, the current voting system is 50% National Internal Jury Voting and the other 50% comes from the televote. And, of course, you cannot vote for your country. Since 2016, the spokesperson of each country gives live the 12 points from the jury and the others are shown automatically on the board while the televote points are given all together in inverse order (first one the country who has less points until the one that has won the highest one). You can´t know who is gonna be the final winner until that very last minute and it is extremely exciting.