The Pirate Party – a party comprised of activists, anarchists, and hackers – looks set to win Iceland’s general election this month.
The win will mark an historic occasion that Western and European leaders thought would never happen.
Icelandmonitor.mbl.is reports:
A new opinion poll conducted by the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland for Icelandic daily Morgunblaðið indicates that over one in five voters will be voting Pirate a week tomorrow.
The data is from 14-19 October and puts the Pirate Party in first place with 22.6%, a point and a half ahead of the centre-right Independence Party (currently in power). These figures would give each party fifteen MPs in Iceland’s 63-seat national parliament (‘Alþingi’).
The top two parties have already either implicitly or explicitly ruled out working together in a coalition.
Iceland’s Pirate Party already made history back in 2013 when they received 5.1% of the vote and returned three MPs – Iceland is currently the only country in the world where the Pirate movement has elected MPs sitting in a national legislature.
Next week’s election look set to blow even this impressive record out of the water, with the Pirates’ potentially winning outright, increasing their number of MPs five-fold, and commanding a strong mandate to form a government.
If there were general elections today, whom would you vote for?
– Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland, 14-19 October
Sean Adl-Tabatabai