It’s hard to believe, but we’ve had our final Super Saturday of the 2021 national final season! In a marathon session lasting eight hours or more, we gathered in our chatroom and joined Eurovision fans from all around Europe in finding out who will represent Estonia, Denmark, Portugal – and apparently also Italy – at this year’s contest in Rotterdam.

Estonia kicked us off in the early evening. The popular view was that, if the juries didn’t screw over last year’s winner Uku Suviste in the first round, his popularity would see him win the televote-only superfinal. And while they did vote him down a bit, it wasn’t enough to stand in his way and he duly claims the ticket to ESC 2021 – “The Lucky One” indeed.

Denmark was next up. No semi-finals and last chance rounds here, just an eight-song final that had left a lot of fans slightly underwhelmed as an audio playlist, but that proved to be very watchable and nicely staged as a TV show. A three-song superfinal was the order of the day here too, and while the winning margin was a relatively tight one, it was “Øve os på hinanden” by synthpop duo Fyr & Flamme that won the right to represent the Scandinavian nation in Rotterdam. Interestingly, it looks like the song will not be translated into English for ESC, making it the first fully Danish-language entry since the legendary “Stemmen i mit liv” in 1997. We hope to see some leopard print this year too.

After two enjoyable (if typically slow-paced) semi-finals, the final of Festival da Canção gave us a similar voting thriller to the 2020 edition, again largely due to the voting system. Like last year, the song that finished second with both the jury and the televote took the victory as a kind of consensus choice. And while Denmark embraces its own language, Portugal will be represented by a song fully in English for the first time ever: “Love Is On My Side” by The Black Mamba.

Finally, the annual five-day marathon that is the Sanremo festival in Italy came to an end with an eye-opening winner, both musically and in terms of styling choices. The rock band Måneskin – another appearance for the Danish language! – took victory in the traditional festival with their song “Zitti e buoni”, and the band have already confirmed that they will accept the invitation to represent Italy in ESC too (something that isn’t automatic, which is why we never previously included Sanremo in our SongHunt, for example). Broadcaster RAI still hasn’t uploaded the final performance at time of writing, so you’ll have to make do with this one from earlier in the week. It’s still great but the outfits are a little more conventional!

Which songs were ROBBED in these national finals? Our SongHunt continues with the aim of finding out – so stay tuned to escgo.com and keep voting in the weekly semi-finals!