Vidbir (Ukraine), Final
Unsurprisingly for a country with a perfect qualifying record at the contest, Ukraine had a strong line-up of eight songs for their national selection. At least half would have done well at Eurovision but Alina Pash with “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” ended up winning selection, edging out Kalush Orchestra by a single point.

Melodi Grand Prix (Norway), Last Chance
Over in Oslo, Maria Mohn’s vocal skills and epic production of her song “Fly” ended up beating Trollfest’s equally epic heavy metal chaos “Dance Like a Pink Flamingo” in their gold duel. The Norwegian final, scheduled for next Saturday evening local time, now has its complete line-up of ten songs in place.

Melodifestivalen (Sweden), Semi-Final 2
Liamoo and 2019 Eurovision alumni John Lundvik qualified directly to the final from this semi, while Alvaro Estrella and Tone Sekelius managed to grab a ticket to the second-chance semi. I’ll review these two tracks later this week, along with the three others who are now out of the contest: Browsing Collection, Niello & Lisa Ajax, and Samira Manners.

EMA (Slovenia), Semi-Final 2
I haven’t had time to look at this yet (as was the case with the first semi final), so I’ll just list the qualifiers and come back to it later in the week. Through to the final are the songs by Anabel, BQL, Gušti feat. Leyre, Hauptman, Leya Leanne, and LPS.

Eesti Laul (Estonia), Final
Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that Stefan’s “Hope” won Eesti Laul, having been a frontrunner from early on, but the fact that “What to Make of This” by Minimal Wind feat. Elisabeth Tiffany ended up in second place was something very few would have predicted. It turned out that the international juries went for this song by quite a margin, but the televote was more decisively in favour of Stefan.

Pabandom is Naujo (Lithuania), Final
In a clear and convincing win, Monika Liu with “Sentimentai” won both the jury vote and televote — second place overall went to Augustė Vedrickaitė with “When You’re 6ft Under”.

Supernova (Latvia), Final
This one came down to 2015 Eurovision alumni Aminata and newcomers Citi Zēni of the notorious opening line. In the end, the newer prevailed over the older, and “Eat Your Salad” is on its way to Turin.

Selecţia Naţională (Romania), Semi-Final
By the sounds of things, this was a giant mess. Online voting had reduced the original 46 entries to 20, who then performed to a jury tasked with picking ten acts to go through to the final next weekend. Some bizarre omissions were made, including “Do Svidanya” by Aris and “Malere” by E-an-na: two songs which were doing very well in terms of public support both locally and in the wider Eurovision community. The ten who still have a chance of winning the ticket to Turin are Alex Parker & Bastien, Andrei Petruş, ‘Cream, Minodora & Diana Bucșă’, Dora Gaitanovici, Gabriel Basco, Kyrie Mendél, MØISE, PETRA, VANU, and WRS.