SongHunt 2018, our poll series to find the best non-winning national final song of the year, has come to an end: “Fără tine” by Dora Gaitanovici, from the Romanian preselection, has won the grand final!

Based on the votes of our chatters in the #esc chat and supplemented by our editors’ choices, a total of 96 songs took part in the eight SongHunt heats between January and March, followed by four quarter-finals and two semi-finals. The 12-song final was open for the two weeks during and after ESC 2018 itself, and over the past week we have been eliminating one song every day until we got to tonight’s six superfinalists.

In a special event in the chat, our chatters voted in three rounds. Firstly, they chose their favourite of the three lowest-scoring songs from the public vote, which resulted in “Piedestal” by Inis Neziri (Albania) going forward to the next round (with Emmy Liyana from France and Tamás Horváth from Hungary dropping out). Next, the four remaining songs were whittled down to two, which meant we said goodbye to Inis Neziri as well as Rebecca from Norway with her song “Who We Are”.

This resulted in a final head-to-head between Spanish summer hit “Lo malo” by Aitana & Ana Guerra (a.k.a. the mighty Aitana War) and Dora from Romania. In a clear and unequivocal verdict, “Fără tine” stormed to victory and was duly crowned the winner of SongHunt 2018!

Looking back at the full results for this year’s SongHunt, “Fără tine” actually achieved the highest chat score of any non-winning finalist during the respective national final show, so its victory didn’t come completely out of the blue. This also means that Romania has defended its SongHunt title, after “Petale” by Instinct won the 2017 edition.

Here’s the reprise of the winning song and performance. Many congratulations to Dora Gaitanovici – and we look forward to seeing which songs become our chat and poll favourites when SongHunt rolls around again in 2019!