Presumed Winners Already? Finland’s UMK 2026 Might Have Found Its Early Frontrunners
UMK season has barely started and Finland is already side-eyeing a possible winner.
Finnish newspaper Iltalehti asked its readers a very simple question: which song is your favourite in UMK 2026?
The answers were… extremely decisive.
According to the poll, Linda Lampenius and Pete Parkkonen’s “Liekinheitin” is the clear reader favourite, and it’s not even particularly close. Over a three-day voting period, more than 6,200 votes were cast. Roughly 4,000 of them went to “Liekinheitin”, giving the song a chunky 65% share.
That’s not a gentle lead.
That’s a “hello, we’re here” moment.
Second place went to Antti Paalanen’s “Takatukka” with 13% of the vote, around 800 votes. A solid showing, but very much in a different postcode to first place.
Everything else sits in a tighter cluster behind those two, which makes the contrast at the top even louder.
Here’s how the full Iltalehti reader ranking looks:
- Linda Lampenius x Pete Parkkonen – “Liekinheitin” (65%, 4021 votes)
- Antti Paalanen – “Takatukka” (13%, 831 votes)
- Komiat – “Lululai” (7%, 435 votes)
- Chachi – “Cherry Cake” (6%, 383 votes)
- Kiki – “Rakkaudenkipee” (4%, 258 votes)
- Etta – “Million Dollar Smile” (3%, 171 votes)
- Sinikka Monte – “Ready To Leave” (2%, 140 votes)
Now, before anyone starts engraving trophies, it’s worth remembering that UMK has never been a competition that blindly follows online polls. Finland has a habit of surprising people. Sometimes the fan favourite wins. Sometimes a completely different song sneaks through the middle.
That unpredictability is part of UMK’s charm.
Still, polls like this are useful as a temperature check, and the temperature right now feels pretty warm for “Liekinheitin”.
Momentum is a funny thing in national finals. Once a song gets labelled as a frontrunner, people start paying closer attention to it. Expectations rise. Performances get dissected harder. Everything suddenly feels more important.
Linda Lampenius and Pete Parkkonen are now very much in that zone.
The UMK 2026 final takes place on 28 February at Tampere’s Nokia Arena, with the winner earning the ticket to represent Finland at Eurovision 2026 in Vienna.
Are we looking at Finland’s next Eurovision act?
Too early to say.
But UMK 2026 already has its first big talking point.
And that’s usually when things start getting interesting.
Source: Iltalehti
