Greece the first stop on Chiara's pre-festival tour

Chiara will tonight perform Malta's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest during the Greek national final in Athens, her first chance to start wooing Europeans with her song What If We.

She will be a guest star, alongside Hadise from Turkey, Christina Metaxas from Cyprus, Petr Elfimov from Belarus, Andrea Demirovic from Montenegro and last year's Greek representative Kalomira.

Nicknamed The Voice, Chiara is slowly building up the promotion for her entry and another trip, this time to Belgium, is planned for next week, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina the week after that.

Chiara has the experience and stamina to know what to expect, having been through this process twice already in 1998 and 2005, eventually placing third and second respectively.

"Luckily my mother can take care of my daughter Ebony when I go on these trips," she said, before packing her bags to fly to Athens.

Chiara will go on to represent Malta in the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow. She will first have to compete in the Eurovision semi-final on May 12, before reaching the final.

The European Broadcasting Union is seeking to abolish the current system of 100 per cent televoting for the final night on May 16. In all probability, during the heads of delegation meeting in March, the EBU will choose to have a system where on the final night the winning Eurovision song will be chosen through 50 per cent televoting and 50 per cent jury. Full televoting will be retained for the two semi-finals.

This is intended to minimise the element of neighbourly bloc voting, which has become a bone of contention in recent years and has split the festival into East and West.

Meanwhile, PBS, which organised the national festival for the first time, has finally released the judges' points for the 20 entries that competed in the national final on February 7.