“Esenski lisja” by Daniel Kajmakoski has been selected by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as its entry for the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Vienna next May.

Although the end of 2014 is still a month and a half away, tonight’s edition of the traditional Skopje Festival doubled up as the Balkan country’s national final for next year’s big event. A total of 20 songs competed for the prize, with the votes being decided by a televote (50%) and seven international juries from various countries (50%).

When combined, their votes gave 3rd place to “Da ne te sakam” by Evgenija Čančalova, 2nd place to “Brod što tone” by Tamara Todevska – the jury’s favourite – and what was ultimately a comfortable victory to televote winner Kajmakoski, who is best known for his victory in X Factor Adria.

In the #esc chat, we disagreed with the result slightly – the winner came 3rd with us. Our favourites were Tamara with an average score of 6.39 points, followed by Aleksandra Janeva’s “Vo tvojot svet” with 5.79 – while our least favourite was “Mig bez tebe” by Goran Naumovski & Sanja Kerkez, which recorded a remarkably low average score of 1.23.

Macedonia’s recent qualification record at ESC has been patchy, although tonight’s interval act did feature two of their most successful entrants, Karolina (2002, 2007) and Kaliopi (2012). Daniel will be hoping the scoreboard is similarly kind to him in Vienna in May – and will at least be looking to improve on the result achieved by Macedonia’s 2014 representative Tijana, who finished 13th in her semi-final with “To The Sky”.

Watch the 2015 Macedonian entry here: