Is Cyprus Going to Put Europe on 'Fuego'?

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The last few days have taken our little island by storm! The reason behind this?; Cyprus, with an amazing leap of 33 places since the day the Cypriot entry was announced last December, is now Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) first favourite to win the competition, according to the bookies’ odds. Do miracles happen then?

At the root of this already amazing success for Cyprus is the charismatic Eleni Foureira, with the song “Fuego”—that means ‘fire’ in Spanish—, who has refuted entirely the earliest ESC odds, and for the first time in the history of the island in the song contest has put Cyprus at the top of Europe’s favourites. Eleni and her dancers with their fierce performance have achieved what we Cypriots thought of as impossible, which is just thinking about winning at all at the competition! 

Do not be mislead, Cyprus has had some amazing performances along the years, and some not so amazing (our lips are sealed on these). What it didn’t have was ‘strong’ allies, since the competition until recently at least was governed mostly by ‘politics’ and geographical alliances. Since first taking part in the ESC in 1981, the best result Cyprus has achieved so far was taking the 5th place ‘thrice’, with the latest being 14 years ago. Since 2005 however Cyprus has not even been amongst the 10 first entry results of the contest. But something is telling us that this is about to change this year!

The song as Eleni has repeatedly said has a deeper meaning of female empowerment represented by the ‘fire’—hence “Fuego”— that women have inside them. Eleni is confident that each and every woman has the power to achieve her dreams no matter the odds and circumstances, like she did coming from a troubled past of where she had to flee her homeland Albania with her family due to the civil war and start from the beginning in a foreign country, Greece.

The act in itself is fire!! Eleni and her dancers dance along the beat of the song for its entire duration with high intensity moves and Eleni’s signature ‘hairography’ moves that seem unreal, with Eleni also singing immaculately  throughout the performance! Since last Tuesday when the 1st ESC Semi Final took place, Eleni has been praised by the BBC News as someone who would ‘make even Beyonce proud' with her moves. Remarkably Cyprus’ act has been compared to the US superstar’s historic Lemonade album! Even the New York Times have named “Fuego” a ‘fiery song’ and Eleni is front cover on the biggest news platforms of the world, including the Washington Post and Euronews.

Also a huge supporter of the Cyprus entry this year is non-other than THE NikkieTutorials. The famous make-up artist/influencer has already featured Eleni during her first ever Instagram Live video on Thursday evening with approximately 15k people watching. Nikkie with over 10 million followers on Instagram and almost 10 million subscribers on her Youtube channel has urged everyone profusely throughout the week to vote for Eleni in the final because according to her she is the ultimate winner. So is this enough?

Do you think that a tiny island like Cyprus will eventually be able to break the status-quo of the ESC, or will ‘politics’ and geographical ‘neighbours’ get in the way? What we know is that Eleni, definitely deserves to win because she delivered one of the best performances, if not the best performance, so far in the competition and the bookies agree!