iconoclast

shortformblog:

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.

Iceland has a really interesting recent political history, including complete financial upheaval, unsuccessful efforts at a crowdsourced constitution, and Reykjavik’s mayor, Jon Gnarr, a comedian running on a comedy platform who has managed to stay in power longer than seven of his predecessors. Gnarr actually ran for parliament as part of the upstart Bright Future party, and the party that actually did pretty well in yesterday’s elections, winning six seats. However, the center-right Independence Party, which was behind the financial implosion, won the election Saturday, gaining 26.7 percent of the vote. But the Pirate Party’s appearance on the national stage couldn’t have come at a better time—The Pirate Bay, perhaps the purest representation of the party’s ideals, just moved to Iceland.

But maybe you don’t care about all that and just want to see pretty pictures.

Yahoo’s move aims to make up for years of missing out on the growth of social networks and mobile devices.