After sitting Eurovision 2013 out, Portugal is back in action. With a less than brilliant record of three qualifications out of nine attempts, resulting in three mid-table-or-less finishes, Portugal are hoping to change their luck this year.

This also marked the return of the Portuguese national selection, Festival da Canção – sadly without the popular segment of the regional jury voting, usually consisting votes from 3,422 regions, give or take a few. Instead, 10 songs competed in a semi-final, five of which qualified to a final which took place a week later and didn’t feel significantly shorter than usual despite having televote results only.

It came down to a duel between two uptempo songs and two female singers: on one side of the ring was Suzy, a virtually unknown singer backed by mega-producer and composer Emanuel, who wrote and composed her song. In the other corner, fan favorite Catarina Pereira, back again with another track from Slovenian composer Andrej Babić.

Suzy and her song Quero ser tua (I want to be yours) beat Pereira quite easily, to the dismay of Eurovision fans. But if you are surprised by the result, you shouldn’t be: the track is in typical Pimba style, a local version of Schlager, which is often looked down on but is extremely popular.

This is not Emanuel’s first visit to the Eurovision Song Contest. In 2007, Sabrina performed a similar track by him in a massive 28-nation semi final, where she finished 11th, just one place shy of qualification.

Quero ser tua is a cheerful uptempo track, infused with a localized Portuguese sound which most viewers will probably identify as some sort of Latino (one fan described the song as “Lambada”meets “Danza Kuduru”, a description that also suggests that, despite the genre’s current popularity in its home country, it might sound a bit outdated to casual viewers and juries). It is also a much better track than Emanuel’s previous attempt. Suzy herself is likeable and manages to bring across a lot of positive energy, and is also pretty easy on the eye. Her singing abilities are adequate enough for the song – her shortcomings as a singer can easily be supported by good backing vocalists. Her NF performance also included shirtless drummers, who are supposed to appear in some way in the reworked choreography.

In Eurovision there’s always some room for a good old (slightly) cheap fun uptempo song that requires little of its audience, except maybe clapping along – a sound that has been added to the revamped backing track. It also has a perfect draw: late in the first semi, right after three back-to-back ballads (Belgium, Moldova and San Marino) and before two more quiet songs (Montenegro and The Netherlands).

My verdict? As one of the very few tracks that could actively make people dance, assuming they did not fall asleep or turn to self-medication to deal with the doom and gloom that is semi 1, the televote should help it through to the final even without much jury support. In the final it will meet other and stronger uptempos coming from the second semi as well as the direct finalists, and will disappear in the bottom third of the scoreboard.

Top 10	Victory	Personal