From the Independence Party convention So why did one Icelander in five think that the Independence Party was the right party to get the country out of the economic mess it is in?  Akin to giving the drunkest person at a party the keys to your car to drive you home, it may sound ridiculous. [...]

They should have suspected that the possibility might occur that they would win the required majority of votes in last weekend’s election.  So what are we waiting for?  Five days later and there is still no announcement of an agreement between the Social Democrats and the Left Greens. What is going on? They keep repeating [...]

  With opinion polls showing views on European Union membership about equally divided among the 320,000 people in this remote land on the edge of the Arctic Circle, Ms. Sigurdardottir has linked her political future to gaining entry to the 27-nation union. She said Saturday at a news conference that applying for entry was an [...]

Russian style privatisation and rapid deregulation lead to exponential growth of the financial sector. In less than a decade, Iceland went from a resource-based economy, dependant on fisheries and geo-thermal energy, to a financial giant. We were all taken by surprise: where did the money come from? The answer came in October. We were living [...]

Some ate their ballots, one woman bit hers and one voter decided to occupy his booth for an hour to prevent others from voting.  But the quirckiest story of the election when more people than ever (3,2%) left their ballots blank in protest over the economic and political situation belongs to the 26 year old [...]

  Nobody has been able to put an overall price tag on the meltdown, though some estimates run to $10 billion, $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. The bank collapse alone is expected to cost taxpayers nearly $3 billion, on top of another $3 billion the government has invested in the [...]

The picture is pretty clear although some minor changes might occur when they count the strikeouts in the next couple of days.  X-S: The Social Democrats are the biggest winners of the election. They scored 30% and are now boast of the largest support in the country, up 3,2% from the last election and manage [...]

Unsurprisingly the first numbers indicate that the government of Social Democrats and Left Greens win a 53% majority and 35 out of 63 seats in Althingi.  The Independence Party looks set to lose around 10 seats and the Progressives make an improvement.  The Liberal Party is wiped out and the Democratic Movement only gets votes [...]

a) The election is held to formally authorize the digging of shit b) No one still knows how much shit there is to dig because no one has still managed to stick their head out of the pile to look.  c) It appears that old shit-dispensers are out of fashion. The Progressive Party and the [...]

On Saturday, Icelanders are likely to do something they haven’t done in more than two decades: Vote a left-wing government into power. The new government will face the enormous task of cleaning up the wreckage of the country’s collapsed financial system. It will also need to resolve internal divides over a touchstone issue: whether Iceland [...]