What’s up UMK? Yle still gives no further information of the Finnish national selection 2019
This autumn has been a long one for the Finnish Eurovision fans and others interested in the Finnish national selection 2019. There’s only two months until the UMK 2019 final, but the Finnish broadcaster Yle still haven’t given almost any information of the contest. Since last year it was announced already in the beginning of November that Saara Aalto was going to represent Finland in the Eurovision 2018, the fans and media expected that the name of the next Finnish Eurovision representative would be annouced before the year 2018 ends.
Almost right after Eurovision 2018 Yle announced that UMK will continue as an invitation contest in 2019. After that announcement the broadcaster has been suprisingly quiet when it comes to UMK. In August Yle promised to tell more information soon, but all that has been told so far is the date of the UMK final, which is March 2nd 2019. The lack of information has gotten both fans and media to speculate what is actually going on in the field of UMK.
The first question is if even Yle knows the name of the next Finnish representative. The most popular Finnish artists haven’t been that interested in Eurovision participation in the past, most likely because of Finland’s poor success in the contest. Saara Aalto was quite obvious choice to Eurovision 2018: she has always been interested in Eurovision participation and she has a huge fan base both in Finland and abroad. There’s no other artist in Finland that would be as obvious Eurovision representative as Aalto, so it is very possible that Yle has difficulties to find an artist well-known and dedicated enough to send to Tel Aviv.
However, there is also another possibility that both fans and media have brought up lately. It is possible that there has been a potential Eurovision representative for Finland who’s had to cancel the participation for some reason. This would surely explain the complete silence of Yle so close to the UMK final 2019.
Whatever is the reason for the silence, I’m sure we all hope that UMK 2019 will be a high-class competition and the artist who represents Finland in Tel Aviv will be dedicated to the contest and does well on the Eurovision stage. Only time will tell how UMK 2019 turns out to be, but until some more information is revealed, the fans and media surely keep on speculating!
As we all remember, in UMK 2018 Saara Aalto gave us three amazing performances. One of them was Domino:
