Eideard

Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

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.

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.

With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007. Final results are to be announced later today.

The conservatives were one of the first governments anywhere to lose office because of the global financial crisis, and it seemed clear Saturday that voters in this country of 320,000 were imposing a further reckoning.

The Independent Party has been blamed for a perceived complicity in the banks’ accumulating unsustainable, multibillion debts, and their partnership with a group of freewheeling Icelandic entrepreneurs known as the “New Vikings…”

About the only thing the New Vikings didn’t do in their attempt to imitate American neocons – was declare war on the Faroe Islands.

Hope they make it through to the other side, soon.