After the October 2016 Icelandic election....folks kinda waited out this long period of government forming up. There was not a clear winner, so you needed a coalition government.
It took several months to work this out, and finally in mid-January 2017....a team coalition was built between the Independence Party, the Reform Party and the Bright Future Party. The new PM? Bjarni Benediktsson.
The wild card in this whole coalition was the Bright Future folks. They were liberal in nature and could fit with most of the agenda items of the two partners. The best description of the group is that they don't really favor any fake stuff. Fake agendas, fake politics, fake double-talking? The leadership of this party are the type that they'd quickly fold up the tent and just walk out the door.
Well....things have occurred in the last month, and the Bright Future Party said enough....they were leaving. The government? Discussions are underway but there's likely an election to be held by the end of November..
What triggered this?
It's an odd story. Iceland has this legal standing procedure called 'restored honor'. It typically means that after you've done some bad stuff....done some time in jail or paid a fine....you go and request 'restored honor' which means that you are accepted back into society, without much notice of your past screw-ups. Viking-justice....would be the appropriate description, in my humble opinion.
Now, you can think of a fifty-odd crimes where this would make sense. Maybe like stealing a guy's horse, or burning some guy's barn.
In this case....there's this Iceland guy who raped his step-daughter every day for twelve years. The law caught up with the guy....he did a couple of years in prison. All of this was about twelve years ago. So he came up as a free man, and he wanted 'restored honor'.
If you explained this to a hundred Icelandic folks....most would just say no.....that's not the real meaning of 'restored honor' and just move on.
Well....the Ministry of Justice processed the request and approved it.
A number of people....to include members of the Icelandic Parliament....asked who vouched for the guy, and how this was done. The Ministry of Justice? No comment. Who handled the paperwork? That's an odd thing.....the father of the Prime Minister. Yeah.....that didn't go well with the Bright Future Party.
The party that appears mostly at fault for letting this go forward? The Independence Party.
I went back and looked at the polling for 2016. The Independence Party took number one in the election....with 29-percent of the vote.
In this case, they really screwed up badly, and public sentiment will not be that great. I'm guessing that they lost about half of their voters by this act.
The 'restored honor' angle? Well....it's done and signed. The rapist guy did his jail time....and by Viking tradition....got his honor back.
The odds that 'restored honor' will stick around? No one says much. I'm guessing that the public is pretty split over this feature of democracy. I went looking for a listing of people and 'restored honor' but no one apparently keeps any internet listing over the topic.
So I look over this....some rapist from 1990s....finally has the law punish him. He does jail-time. And then a decade later....by a simple paperwork game....he collapses the Icelandic government. You can't write a script for a movie like this because it's just too unbelievable. In fact, you might actually see the whole Independence Party dissolve because of this whole thing and a low-turnout of voters.
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