General Elections 2016 in Iceland | Hacker News Reader

General Elections 2016 in Iceland

icelandmonitor.mbl.is

54 pointsfnordsensei18 comments

Great to see TPP get a significant place in national politics. Im quite interested to see how the coalition talks will go. Their intended colaboration of the TPP, the Left-Green Movement, Bright Future, and Social Democratic Alliance is not going to work. The central right Independence Party is the biggest party so I guess it will probably be the first one to attempt to form a coalition. If they join with the new and also right-wing Regeneration they will have 28 of the required 32 seats, and then it's a question who else would join. Not sure if TPP would want to join two right wing parties? TPP and the left green movement have 20 seats together, so they'd need the Independency party (unlikely together with the Left green I suppose) or 2 other parties.

>If they join with the new and also right-wing Regeneration they will have 28 of the required 32 seats, and then it's a question who else would join. Not sure if TPP would want to join two right wing parties?

They have rued out working with the Independence party.

>They have rued out working with the Independence party.

Well since they said that they have appeared to cautiously back away from that statement in the days leading up to the election. Today they said they would not join the PP in its coalition.[1]

1. http://www.mbl.is/frettir/kosning/2016/10/30/vill_ekki_samst...

I meant that the Pirate Party have ruled out working with the Independence Party.

If you must turn "The Pirate Party" into an acronym just use "PP", this use of "TPP" is highly confusing, since nobody uses it for the Pirate Party, and it's easily confused with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Better not. PP is taken yet for People's Party, present in a lot of european countries as E(uropean)PP and opposite to the pirate party. Would be much more confusing.

A better alternative could be to use unicode alt+9760

Forming a government is going to be especially tricky. The government collapsed due to corruption revealed by the Panama Papers.

The previously governing parties are the Independence Party & Progressive Party, both of whom had ministers exposed by the papers.

They don't have enough of a following to form a government on their own.

The Left-Green Movement & Pirate Party say it's out of the question to be in government with those two.

The new Regeneration party, which is a new party which split off from the Independence Party. They don't want a coalition with the governing parties.

Negotiations are actively under way, the Regeneration party is in a key negotiating position.

As someone with no skin in the game, this is a super interesting result.

    Ind(21) + Pro(8) + Reg(7) = 36
    Ind(21) + Pro(8) + Bri(4) = 33
    Ind(21) + Pro(8) + Soc(3) = 32

    Ind(21) + Reg(7) + Bri(4) = 32

    Lef(10) + Pir(10) + Reg(7) + Bri(4) + Soc(3) = 34

If Independence Party and Progressive Party won't form with each other either then that essentially guarantees the Regeneration party and the Bright Future.

Of course, as coalition governments around the world have shown, parties lie about what they will do initially in order to get a better deal. Basic negotiation strategy.

Yeah it's going to be really interesting whatever happens.

As a point of clarification. The Independence Party and Progressive Party would be happy to form a government with each other, they think that overall they did great, and downplay the corruption that brought down the government.

But they don't have enough following to do it on their own, and all the other parties they could form with have made commitments of not forming with those two together.

Although both were deeply involved in the corruption that brought down the government, the PM was from the Progressives, and it lost a massive following in the election while the Independence party gained following. So it's politically untenable to work with the Progressives, but some parties might be willing to work with the Independence party.

    > Ind(21) + Reg(7) + Bri(4) = 32

This would be possible, and Bright Future isn't ruling it out: http://stundin.is/frett/bjort-framtid-utilokar-ekki-haegri-s...

But a one party majority in parliament would be really precarious, and it would be very interesting to see what concessions have to get made.

    > Lef(10) + Pir(10) + Reg(7) + Bri(4) + Soc(3) = 34

This would also be a really interesting combination. The Regeneration party says they don't want to go into government with the Pirates, but who knows how much of this is political posturing. I don't think they have any inherent clash of political issues they couldn't both get over given some negotiation.

I find Falkvinge's libertarianism[1, 2] much more compatible with the idea of a pirate party than direct democracy; democracy can outvote individual freedom and create a majority rule over an individual[3]. Other pirate parties are a good example of how the core principles can get outvoted and diluted with off-topic issues.

In 2015 Pirate Party of Iceland overthrew the blasphemy laws[41, which is a great success. I honestly hope they do not take the way of the modern left and introduce the concept of "hate speech" which limits free speech to only ideas the ruling group likes. It has happened over and over.

Still, I see this victory as a positive move. I hope the party will succeed in passing a meaningful copyright and patent reform.

[1] https://falkvinge.net/

[2] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/

[3] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

[4] https://www.rt.com/news/271645-iceland-pirates-blasphemy-law...

The party's main policy for this election isn't to try to enact direct democracy. It's something they have as part of their core policy[1]. You can read about what they want to accomplish in the shorter term here[2].

They'd like to sensibly work towards more self-determination and greater direct participation in the government, not try to establish direct voting on every issue and abolish parliament.

I think you're mistaken about more direct democracy being some easy part to tyranny. Right now if the majority in Iceland wanted to say, completely restrict freedom of speech, this would just be the main issue in the next election. Some tyrannical party would get voted into power and they'd make it the law. No direct democracy needed.

Of course there's something to be said about the moderating influence of the time delay required for that, but there's other ways to achieve that.

I think you're missing what a moderating influence it can be for a society to feel like they're directly involved in decision making, and how that could be an even bigger moderating influence than directly removing power from the population.

[1] http://piratar.is/en/core-policy/

[2] http://piratar.is/en/election-manifesto-2016/

I hope they don't get down the route of the fiasco that is the Swedish Pirate Party.

what happened there?

they got more busy talking about men who spread their legs on the train than actual politics

Ridiculous internal conflicts and power struggles. People used the party to push their own agendas in areas completely unrelated to the party's core values. It became another irrelevant radical party wanting to fix everything instead of focusing on what united us to begin with.

Can't be worse than the German version, can it?

I hope this will lead to increased transparency and knowledge of information technology in other nations if Iceland can be a good example.

More likely outcome: parties in other countries scrambling to figure out how they can make sure a repeat doesn't happen without any improvements in transparency.

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