Iceland government falls

[Magda Hassan]

Iceland recently held elections and there is a new government. Unfortunately it is the same one that caused all their troubles before:

Iceland's centre-right opposition has declared victory in parliamentary elections, as voters punished the incumbent leftist government for harsh austerity measures during its four years at the helm.They will now form a coalition government after a count of 45 per cent of votes suggested the rightwing Independence Party would get 21 seats in parliament, with the centrist-agrarian Progressive Party set to double its seats to 18.
It marks a return to power for the two parties, which both want to end the Atlantic island nation's European Union accession talks.
The Independence Party's leader Bjarni Benediktsson told supporters he was ready to negotiate a coalition that would lead the country.
"[We are] called to duty again. The situation now calls for change," Mr Benediktsson said.
The two parties have staged a remarkable comeback since they were ousted in a 2009 election after presiding over the worst financial crisis to ever hit the small country.
Before the crisis the mortgages offered by Icelandic banks were linked to inflation, resulting in spiralling borrowing costs for homeowners when the krona collapsed against other currencies.
After four years of tax hikes and austerity designed to meet international lenders' demands, the Independence Party has offered debt-laden voters tax credits.
The Progressive Party, a historic coalition partner to the Independence Party, has vowed to go even further by asking banks to write off some of the debt.
"We will change Iceland for the better very fast in the coming months and years," said the party's leader, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson.
The biggest party traditionally picks the prime minister and polls in the final weeks of campaigning had put the two parties neck-and-neck.
The incumbent social democratic Alliance Party was looking at a drop in parliamentary seats from 19 to 10. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-28/ic...in/4655888

On the other hand the Pirate Party did very well too and it is good to see Birgitta still in parliament:

Pirate Party wins 3 seats in Icelandic parliament for its best result worldwide

One of the new Pirates, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, has a long history with WikiLeaks.

by Cyrus Farivar - Apr 29 2013, 3:20am AUSEST

On Saturday, Iceland held national parliamentary elections and the newly-formed Pirate Party of Iceland won 5.1 percent of the vote. This earned the party three seats in parliament, making the new Píratar the most successful Pirate Party in any national legislative body around the globe.
Iceland's unicameral parliament, known in Icelandic as the Alþing ("All-thing"), has just 63 members to represent the country's 320,000 people.
By comparison, the Czech Republic has one Pirate Party parliamentarian, Germany has 45 state-level Pirate lawmakers (plus, recent party struggles), and Sweden has two representatives of its Pirate Party in the European Parliament. As is the case anywhere Pirates hold elective office, the group still represents a tiny minority in Icelandmost of the seats in the Alþing will go to the center-right Independence Party. In the United States, the Pirate Party has had very limited success and is extremely unlikely to get elected to either the House of Representatives or the Senate.
The three new Icelandic lawmakers include Jón Þór Ólafsson, a business administration student at the University of Iceland; Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson, a computer programmer; and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a well-known WikiLeaks volunteer and former member of parliament from 2009 to 2013.
Birgitta is also one of three activists involved in a WikiLeaks investigation currently underway in the United States. In November 2011, a district court judge found that prosecutors could compel Twitter to give up specific information on the three accounts, including IP addresses, direct messages, and other data. In January 2013, a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled (PDF) that Birgitta and the two others have no right to find out which other companies the government sought information from besides Twitter.
The trio, along with other members of Iceland's digerati (including Smári McCarthy, who also is one of the organizers of the International Modern Media Initiative), founded the party just five months ago. The Pirate Party at large was founded in Sweden in 2006, focusing on a digital agenda including items such as IP law reform and Internet policies

"We are really very grateful for the [electorate's] trust," Birgitta told the state broadcaster, RÚV http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/...worldwide/