New poll puts Pirates back on course to win Iceland elections

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. MORE: Politics in Iceland: A beginner’s guide 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 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. MORE: Is Iceland heading for post-election deadlock? MORE: Iceland’s Pirates: A generational thing? 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.