Russia has won the 17th annual edition of ChatVote, the traditional event held by escgo! and the #esc chatroom to find our favourite song ahead of each year’s Eurovision Song Contest!

In the 2021 edition, “Russian Woman” by Manizha received a total of 171 points, ahead of Fyr & Flamme from Denmark in second place (152 points) and Måneskin from Italy in third place (150 points). Meanwhile, the Czech Republic propped up the table, with Benny Cristo’s “Omaga” receiving a total of 13 points in last place.

This year, the majority of the points were determined by “juries” – regular chatters who gave their votes in ESC-style (12-10-8…) – enhanced by a “televoting” component in the form of a live vote held in the chat during tonight’s event, which was converted into a “supervote” with a weighting of 5x that of a regular jury.

Having taken a healthy lead with the 25 juries, Manizha’s third place in the live chat vote was enough for her to secure overall victory – while topping that vote was what propelled Denmark into second place in our final table.

As a look at the history of the #esc ChatVote shows, not only is this Russia’s first ever win in our ChatVote, but it’s actually the country’s first time in our top three!

You can see the final scoreboard of ChatVote 2021 here:

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in our semi-finals, final viewing night and tonight’s final results show – we couldn’t do it without all of you!

So that’s all until 2022 – although there is the small matter of the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam to enjoy first! We’ll be covering that from the online press centre, giving you rehearsal reports and interesting insights from the press conferences, as well as the usual analytical coverage from our multinational team.

Manizha shared a very special version of the song at the PrePartyES21 online preview party last weekend – do check that out if you haven’t already! – but we’ll end this article with the regular version of the song as we say: Congratulations, Russia!