With the quest to find Teya Dora’s successor heating up, speculation has arisen over potential changes to the voting system for Pesma Za Evroviziju.
Potential voting changes
At present Serbia’s selection uses an equally weighted jury and televote, using a non-proportional Eurovision-style system. Meaning the televote and jury winner receives 12 points, the runner up receives 10 points, and so on and so forth respectively. Eurovision fan site ESC Serbia has noted in the recently published rules for the contest that the Eurovision-style voting is not present in the current edition of the rulebook. This has led to speculation that the RTS has potentially changed the voting system to something more proportional, akin to what is seen in neighbouring Croatia’s Dora. ESC Serbia noted that had a proportional voting system been used in the most recent edition of the contest Teya Dora would have only came second, losing out to Breskvica’s ‘Gnezdo Orlovo’.
At present it is not known who will participate the upcoming edition of the contest, with RTS having only closed the submissions on the 10th of this month, having recently extended the deadline for submissions of the contest.
Not long ago our team discussed how we’d adapt Serbia’s national final, with voting reform high on the agenda. You can read out thoughts here.
What is Pesma Za Evroviziju?
Pesma Za Evroviziju has been the selection show for Serbia’s Eurovision entry since 2022, with Konstrakta winning the inaugural edition. It replaced the iconic Beovizija music festival after RTS lost the rights to use their brand. The show takes place over one week, and consists of two semi-finals each containing a non fixed amount around 15 artists, of which 8 (or 9 in 2022) qualify to the final. Points are awarded via a 50/50 televote-jury split where points are converted to a 12-1 scale. At least 51% of the lyrics of all submitted songs must be in one of Serbia’s official languages.
Serbia’s Eurovision Journey
In 2007, Serbia made its debut as an independent country, having previously participated as part of Yugoslavia and Serbia & Montenegro. There, they were represented by Marija Šerifović with “Molitva”, which managed to win the competition. Since their debut, Serbia has participated 16 times (13 of which, where they qualified for the Grand Final).
Teya Dora represented Serbia at Eurovision 2024 in Malmö with her song “Ramonda”. At this year’s competition, Serbia managed to qualify for the Grand Final, where they placed 17th. At the close of voting, she received 54 points – 22 coming from the jury and 32 from the televote.
Would you like to see changes in the voting system? As always, please let us know what you think by getting involved in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow ‘That Eurovision Site’ on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Threads, tumblr, and Bluesky for more information about Eurovision 2025!
News soruce: RTS, via ESC Serbia
Photo credit: RTS
Rory Gannon 
Giwrgos Oiko