Seventeenth place, but not the seventeenth measure of Lavina's song

In the first second of Lavina’s Eurovision 2026 performance at the Vienna Stadthalle, frontman Pavle Arandjelovic stands at the centre of the stage, the camera approaches from overhead, and somewhere in the audience a flag rises with squares of red, blue and white that in that moment does not yet imply a context. Beside Me, the song the Belgrade group performed this evening, runs three minutes and eleven seconds, with two choruses and a bridge, and at the moment it ends the frontman looks straight at the camera but with the tone of a man who still has to guess what will happen next. After nearly three hours of voting, the result lands on a placing that is not a great story but neither a failure: seventeenth place, with ninety points.

Lavina won the national selection Pesma za Evroviziju ‘26, held on 28 February at the Belgrade Pioneer Centre. With a combined jury and public score of twenty-four points, the group beat the runner-up by a wide margin and, from the two-stage SMS vote, drew twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine messages, more than double the next competitor’s tally. The three months that followed they spent on a promotional tour of European capitals, from Madrid and Amsterdam to Stockholm, a process RTS has treated over the last two seasons as part of standard Eurovision preparation.

The group Lavina has been present in Serbian pop production since 2018. Behind Beside Me stands an authorial team of seven, including Andrija Cvetanovic, Bojan Ilic, Luka Arandjelovic, Nikola Petrovic, Pavle Arandjelovic, Pavle Samardzic and music producer Ivan Jegdic. Their previous releases moved through the space of mainstream pop with elements of modern folk arrangement, but without breaking into the major commercial positions. With Beside Me, built on a typical modern European pop template featuring a strong arrangement for the second chorus, the group managed in Belgrade three months ago to consolidate a broad domestic audience, which has now partly carried over into the European vote.

What the result says about Serbian Eurovision entries

Ninety points and seventeenth place are neither a defeat nor a memorable achievement. Compared with Serbia’s results over the previous three seasons, where the national act finished between twenty-first and twenty-sixth, Lavina’s result represents a stabilisation after a longer period in which Serbian participation was seen as merely formal. Compared with the era when Marija Serifovic won first place in Helsinki in 2007 with Molitva, or with Zeljko Joksimovic’s runner-up finishes, the placing remains in the middle zone, which in a European competition where the public and juries from some forty countries vote is often the most achievable result without major commercial reach.

A structural analysis of the voting, published the day after the final by the European Broadcasting Union, shows Lavina did best in the neighbourhood, with twelve points from North Macedonia, ten from Montenegro and eight from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a pattern seen at this competition for years and not to be treated as surprising. More unexpectedly, the group did relatively well with Scandinavian juries, seven points from Norway and five from Denmark, suggesting that the production template of the song was recognised in markets accustomed to a similar sound from Anna Maria Espinosa and other artists in the Nordic pop space.

The result Lavina achieved in Vienna opens two possible paths for RTS in the next cycle. The first is to continue with the Pesma za Evroviziju format in its current shape, in which the domestic audience’s SMS vote carries disproportionate weight, guaranteeing a star legitimised by domestic viewers but not necessarily a performer optimised for the European placing. The second path is a revision of the model toward a selection more focused on the public outside Serbia, the approach Norway and Sweden have tested for years through their Melodifestivalen. RTS director Vladimir Vasiljevic, in a statement after the final, said that a debate on the format will be opened at the next Board session, scheduled for 12 June.

Lavina return to Belgrade this Monday; a concert in their honour is announced for 30 May in the RTS hall at Kosutnjak. Beside Me has by now gathered more than three million views on the official Eurovision YouTube channel, a figure that secures the group commercial visibility at least through the end of the calendar year.