Thirty thousand people have already signed an online petition urging President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to run for office for the fifth time.

The list includes Mickey Mouse, Gordon Brown, Mao Zedong and some prominent Icelanders, such as former Minister Guðni Ágústsson from the town of Selfoss.

Last week Fréttablaðið conducted a poll, which found that 54 percent of the nation wants Ólafur Ragnar to run again.

Good for him. 

But good for the nation? Currently he is the second longest serving democratic ruling head of state or leader of a national government.

Only the Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker has served longer.

Half a year longer, to be exact.

In the same poll, Samstaða, the new party of former Left Green parliamentarian Lilja Mósesdóttir, got one fifth of the vote, making her one-week old party the second biggest with 21,3 percent.

Strange ... very strange. A one-agenda party: the agenda to write off at least 20 percent of the debts of Icelandic households.

There is something called a free lunch. Or is there?

Someone has to pay.

Should it be pension funds?

Or the income tax could be raised by 12 percent in order to be able to write off the housing loans.

The biggest party, with 35 percent, according to the new poll, is the Independence party, the party that has more or less controlled Iceland for the last fifty years.

Its former leader Geir Haarde was the captain who sailed The Republic of Iceland to the Kreppa, the economic meltdown of October 2008.

Looks like people, the voters, are very quick to forget.

The Independence party would go up from 16 to 24 members at Alþingi, the Icelandic Parliament.

Number three and four, both with 12 percent, are The Social Democrats, Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir’s party, and the Progressive Party.

The Left Greens, the other party in the government, got only eight percent in the last week’s poll, indicating that they would only get five parliamentarians now compared to 12 in the last elections.

From bad to worse.

The Left Greens are paying the price for heavy infighting within the party. And within the government.

For example, Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson who seems to know everything and anything better than everybody else.

Must be the world’s brightest person. By far.

The Social Democrats would drop from their 20 parliamentarians to a mere nine.

The two parties in the ruling coalition, which currently have a total of 32 MPs, would see their numbers plummet to 14 parliamentarians were the elections held today. A catastrophe. 

Other parties such as Björt Framtíð, which translates as “Bright Future”, would get six percent of the vote, and four parliamentarians.

No other parties would be represented at Alþingi.
 
Lilja Mósesdóttir’s party would get 14 out of 63 MPs. She is now independent. She has left the Left Greens.

Did she see the forecast? 

One of her new parliamentarians would be the weather man Siggi Stormur. He is the vice president of her week-old one-agenda party Samstaða, or “Solidarity”.

NB: The party, her party, has nothing to with the Polish revolution party of Lech Wałęsa.

Páll Stefánsson – ps@icelandreview.com