Eurovision 2019 final: The Netherlands won, Lazarev became the third

The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest this year was the singer from the Netherlands Duncan Lawrence, in second place — the Italian rapper Mahmud. The representative of Russia Sergey Lazarev, as three years ago, took third place. We tell you about the highlights of the contest.

The 64th Eurovision Song Contest was held in Tel Aviv in Israel from May 14 to 18. Representatives of 26 countries competed for the victory. American journalists called this event a "kitsch festival" because in recent years, the contenders for victory have been trying to stand out with the help of bright performances, atypical images and themes of songs.

The representative of the Netherlands, Duncan Lawrence, won this year's contest with the song Arcade, although his presentation was quite minimalistic: he performed a rather traditional ballad about a broken heart.

Lawrence is 25 years old. In 2014, he took part in the Dutch version of the show "The Voice", where he reached the semifinals. After that, Lawrence studied at the Rock Academy in Tilburg and graduated in 2019.

Bookmakers called the representative of the Netherlands one of the favorites before the contest. Together with him, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Azerbaijan were predicted to win. As a result, the Netherlands, Italy and Russia took the first three places. The representative of Great Britain took the last place.

Lazarev's number turned out to be so spectacular, becoming the embodiment of longing and drama, that social media users could not pass by and gave out a powerful portion of memes.

The previous Eurovision Song Contest was won by Israeli singer Neta Barzilai with the song Toy. Thanks to this, Israel hosted this contest for the third time in its history. Before that, Eurovision had already been held in Israel in 1979 and 1999.

By tradition, the final gala concert was held after the contest, in which the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest of recent years took part, and each of them sang the song that won the next year after it. It was also attended by Madonna and Verka Serdyuchka, who took second place in the 2007 contest, among other honored guests.