New poll puts Pirates back on course to win Iceland elections

Whatever happens next weekend, Iceland's Pirates will make history.

Whatever happens next weekend, Iceland's Pirates will make history. Photo: Iceland Monitor/Eggert Jóhannesson

Iceland’s Pirate Party may be about to make history as the world’s first ‘pirate’ movement to win national general elections.

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.

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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’).

With eight days to go before polling, can the ruling …

With eight days to go before polling, can the ruling Independence Party erode the Pirates' lead? Photo: Iceland Monitor/Árni Sæberg

The top two parties have already either implicitly or explicitly ruled out working together in a coalition.

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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.

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