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NYTIceland’s Voters Are Poised to Punish Conservatives
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: April 25, 2009
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — It is a tale of light and dark — of a small but rugged country far from anywhere that has suffered as severely as any in the developed world at the hands of buccaneering free-marketeers, but which is now slowly digging itself out from the financial wreckage.
Voters waited at a polling station at City Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland. A leftist coalition is expected to win a strong popular mandate.
An important milestone was reached on Saturday, when the country’s voters went to the polls to elect a new government, three months after riotous street protests over the country’s banking collapse forced the country’s conservative-led administration from office. Leading one of the first governments anywhere to lose office because of the global financial crisis, the conservatives were blamed for their perceived complicity in the banks’ accumulating unsustainable, multibillion debts, and their partnership with a group of freewheeling Icelandic entrepreneurs known as the “New Vikings.”
Six months after the banks collapsed and three of the largest were nationalized, the grim consequences are only now becoming fully understood after months of forensic work by financial experts. Many of the debts that drove the banks to the brink of default were incurred as the New Vikings went on a splurge of acquisitions that made them owners of department store chains, soccer clubs and investment houses in Britain and other parts of Europe, as well as mansions, helicopters and Ferraris on their sojourns at home here in Iceland.
At least for the moment, the entrepreneurs are pariahs, and the electorate in this country of 350,000 is poised to impose a reckoning, punishing the conservatives and handing power for the first time in Iceland to a leftist coalition.
The final outcome of the election, expected to be announced on Sunday, was expected to be a strong popular mandate for the Social Democrats and Left-Greens, a socialist group, who have formed a caretaker government since February. Opinion polls before the vote showed a wide lead for the two left-wing parties, which together drew the support of more than 55 percent of those polled, with the Social Democrats narrowly outpolling the more radical Left-Greens.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/world/europe/26iceland.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss