This weekend I got to vote in Iceland for the first time! We dirty foreigners are only allowed to vote in local elections. The law was just change to reduce the waiting time from 5 to 3 years of residency. I have lived on and off in Iceland for 20 years now, but due to my wanderlust I never reached the 5 consecutive years I needed. But that is over now.
Icelandic voting is different from German voting in that you do not have a first and second (direct and proportional) vote, but you vote for a list of people from a party (proportional). The cool thing is that you can edit the list you vote for, change the seats of candidates (put someone on a lower seat to the first for example) and cross people out. I have been long enough in Iceland to have personal grudges and friendships with people on the list, so I had a lot of fun doing that.
There were also local elections in Germany, but I missed the deadline to apply for voting by post. I managed to do that in the last parliament elections in Germany. I had a lot of fun reading all the names of the fringe parties (there is a HipHop party) and wonder about the envelope sizes (the ballot needs to be folded strangely to fit in the inner envelope, causing me to read and reread the instructions).

Pictures of the German ballot, obviously I couldn't take pictures in the voting booth

Today is Good Friday, and in Germany and Iceland it means that by law one is not allowed to dance, gamble or make jokes. I'm nothing but not a rebel, so here is my very inside joke for today:

The office of Efling union is restructuring. To safe costs all employees are fired and replaced by Andri Sigurðsson and his never to be finished web site.

I'm probably thinking of the word because I made lentils the other day. A Erbsenzähler (pea counter) is an overly pedantic person. It is a subspecies of the Spießer. In the good old days it was also used for a stingy person, but these days it refers to people who end up working for government institutions, so that they can deny your applications because of the smallest technicalities.

The picture is from my my trip to Belgium last year. My sister and her family, my father and his wife and me stayed for a week in the same summer house we used to go when I was a kid. It was a relaxing holiday and a nice trip down memory lane. It was so good to be out of Iceland and in the sun again, after being stuck for all of 2020. At least it was nice until global warming arrived at my childhood home, but that is a story for a future blog post.

Björt Framtið (bright future) was a political part founded in 2012. It was one of the may parties who appeared in the aftermath of the economic crash in 2008 and the realisation of corruption in Icelandic politics. As most of the parties after the crash their politics were based on promoting direct democracy (many of the party members had also been involved in the movement for a new constitution), some social programs and anti corruption measures.

Ten years later it is hard to describe the mood in 2012. There was a general optimism in the air, a hope that the old and corrupt system could be reformed into something new. In 2015 Björt Framtið had merged with Besti Flokkurinn, a protest party founded by comedian Jón Gnarr, a party that had famously come into power in Reykjavík. In 2017 they formed a coalition government with Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (one of the parties responsible for the economic crash in 2008) and Viðreisn, a liberal party with the idea to "change the system from the inside". The government fell apart in October of the same year, after yet another corruption scandal, which I wrote about during the time here. Björt Framtið never recovered. They received 1.2% in the election after the scandal and have been inactive since.

So why am I writing about them now? Well, they just were in the news, because their Twitter account had been hacked by some NFT promoting bot and is now just spouting NFT and blockchain promotion. And I just can't help but feel that the party called "Bright Future" founded with that much hope in 2012, embroiled in and destroyed by the corruption within the system they joined to change, ending up being hijacked for NFT promotion is just the perfect nut shelling of the last ten years. Oh what a bright future we got.