Finland will take part in the Eurovision song contest 2026 for the 59th time. Finland has taken part every year since its debut in 1961 - 65 years ago - except in 1970 (when boycotting along with Austria, Norway, Sweden and Portugal the voting system and previous year's chaos) and due to being relegated in 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003 thanks to those insane rules back then. Over the years Finland was considered quite an under achiever with last places coming this way a bit too often in the first decades. In this series I will go through the first contests, how we came up with the eventual entry and we can remember from the other songs from those years. For the 1964 national Eurovision selection Yle invited ten composers, each with two songs but only one of them made the final cut. The composers had free hands who to invite to perform it all the way to Copenhagen as there was no will to cause commotion by changing artist afterwards, a bit like Portugal in the 2020's, The ...
