Iceland yesterday voted in a second snap election in just a year as several scandals have caused a distrust in the political elite, despite a thriving economy triggered by booming tourism.
Icelandic Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson of the conservative Independence Party called the vote last month after a junior member of the three-party center-right coalition quit the government over a legal scandal involving his father.
Yesterday’s election was Iceland’s fourth since 2008. Polls published on Friday by public broadcaster RUV and the daily Morgunbladid show that the Independence Party could get 17 seats in the 63-seat parliament, the Althingi.
Photo: EPA
The main rival Left-Green Movement and its potential partners — the Social Democratic Alliance and the anti-establishment Pirate Party — would together win 29 seats, too short of a 32-seat outright majority.
However, with help from a fourth party, they could dethrone the center-right and become Iceland’s second left-leaning government since its independence from Denmark in 1944.
“If these are the election results, it’s a call for the opposition to form a government,” Left-Green leader Katrin Jakobsdottir, 41, told Morgunbladid.
However, the Independence could also partner with their former ally, the Progressives, which would win between five to six seats, the Center Party (six seats) and the liberal Reform party (five seats).
“These numbers tell me that we need a boost,” Benediktsson, 47, told Morgunbladid.
Under the Icelandic system, the president, who holds a largely ceremonial role, tasks the leader of the biggest party with forming a government.
“The fear is whether there will be a possibility to form a government,” Arnar Thor Jonsson, a law professor at Reykjavik University, told reporters, adding that negotiations to form a coalition after the October last year election took three months.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, when Iceland’s three major banks collapsed and the country teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, it has made a spectacular recovery with robust growth of 7.2 percent last year and unemployment at an enviable 2.5 percent.
However, anger and lack of trust in the financial elite and several politicians, who were implicated in the Panama Papers that revealed a global tax evasion, has shaken up politics in the island nation.
A year ago, snap elections were called after then-Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was pressured to resign when he was named in the so-called Panama Papers tax data leak which exposed offshore tax havens.
More than 600 Icelanders — a surprisingly high number in a country of 335,000 — were also named in the documents, including Benediktsson, the then-minister of finance.
Despite that, Benediktsson was able to build a coalition with the centrist Bright Future and center-right Reform Party, holding a one-seat majority in parliament before becoming the shortest-lived government in Iceland’s history.
Hannes Gissurarson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland, said the reason behind the Independence’s resurrection can be attributed to the famous phrase of former US president Bill Clinton’s chief strategist James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Construction is booming: cranes cover the skies in Reykjavik’s city center, away from Iceland’s breathtaking volcanoes and glaciers. Independence supporters still view the party as the main force for economic stability and growth. Nearly half of the post-World War II prime ministers came from the euroskeptic party.
The Independence and the Progressive party ended Iceland’s EU membership bid in 2015 over a mackerel war with Brussels.
Eva Sveinsdottir, a 33-year-old conservative voter, said the former center-right government’s decision to end the talks “saved Iceland after the 2008 crisis.”
“We are in a much better situation than Greece,” she said. “If we were a member they would take the fishing areas from us.”
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