Iceland's prime minister to resign after Pirate Party surge

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson votes in the election that led to his resignation
(Image credit: Halldor Kolbeins/Getty Images)

Iceland's prime minister, Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, announced Sunday he will resign after his center-right Progressive Party lost more than half its seats in Iceland's ancient parliament, the 63-seat Althing. Johannsson had only been in office since April, when the Panama Papers scandal forced out his predecessor.

While the Progressives declined, the four-year-old Pirate Party — described as "a collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians, and web geeks" — more than tripled its parliamentary presence from three seats to 10. But the new prime minister will likely come from the conservative Independence Party, which now holds the largest block in the Althing at 21 seats.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.