Iceland's Pirate Party scrapes in at national elections

Iceland's latest national election has seen the Pirate Party there narrowly manage to surpass the five percent vote share needed to win seats in the country's parliament. Its three ministers are the first politicians from any Pirate Party to win seats in a national election.

The island's national parliament, the Althing, was first founded in 930 and is generally considered to be the oldest representative parliament in the world. Its 63 seats are divided up proportionately among the parties running, with a five percent threshold for receiving seats. The Pirate Party -- whose leader Birgitta Jónsdóttir is best known internationally for her work with Wikileaks and her support for its operations in the wake of criticisms by the American government -- squeaked in at 5.1 percent. 

That gives the Pirate Party three seats, making it the smallest party in the Althing and one of two being represented for the first time (the other being the liberal Bright Future party). Those three members of parliament represent the first victory anywhere for a Pirate Party at the level of a national election.

Across Europe, pirate parties are having mixed success. While occasional local election successes have been welcome, there have been repeated failures to win seats at the national level. The German Pirate Party surprised many by failing to make the jump from state to national success last year, and even the Swedish Pirate Party -- the first, and most successful Pirate Party, with two MEPs in the European Parliament -- failed to secure representation in Sweden's national legislature.

The current plan for the pirate parties of Europe is to join together for a united push for the European Parliament in the forthcoming elections of 2014, with candidates running in at least 25 different countries.

The winners of the election were the centre-right Progressive and Independence parties, both of which are strongly Eurosceptic and benefitting from a left-wing vote split among a host of new anti-establishment parties -- so many that, according to the Independent, there is "genuine confusion" as to how many there are (though in the end there were 15 competing in the election, up from seven in 2009). Only six won more than five percent to gain seats.

The combined 51.1 percent of the vote, and 38 of 63 seats, should give the two parties the basis of a governing coalition.