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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the the-times-they-are-a'changing dept.

Common Dreams reports [commondreams.org]

Saturday night's election results show [that] Iceland's Pirate Party [...] won 10 seats, more than tripling its three seats in the last election. The Left-Green Party also won 10 seats.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the leader of the Pirate Party, said she was satisfied with the result. "Whatever happens, we have created a wave of change in the Icelandic society", she told a cheering crowd early Sunday morning [October 30].

The left-leaning parties--the Left-Greens, the Pirates, and two allies--won a total of 27 seats, just short of the 32 required to command a majority in Iceland's Parliament, the world's oldest.

The governing center-right Progressive party lost more than half of its seats in the election which was triggered by Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson's resignation in April in the wake of the leaked Panama Papers [bbc.co.uk] which revealed the offshore assets of high-profile figures.

Current Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson [resigned October 30].

The anti-establishment Pirate Party, which was founded in 2012, had said it could be looking to form a coalition with three left-wing and centrist parties.

The Pirates' core issues [piratar.is] are: direct democracy, freedom of expression, civil rights, net neutrality, and transparency, all set out in a popular, crowdsourced [boingboing.net] draft of a new national Constitution that the current government has failed to act on. They also seek to re-nationalize the country's natural resource industries, create new rules for civic governance, and issue a passport to Edward Snowden.

Previous: Iceland's Pirate Party Tops Polls Ahead of National Elections [soylentnews.org]

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