If you believe that our ongoing presidential campaign has been strange beyond all compare, that it’s a singularly odd bit of political theater, like nothing before and (hopefully) like nothing ahead, then you’ve likely not been following the doings in Iceland.

There, a bunch of pirates just got themselves elected to the world’s oldest parliament.

Really.

The Pirate Party, a collection of anarchists and hackers, had been expected to perform very well in Saturday’s balloting. Some pre-election polls even had the Pirates coming out on top. And while that did not come to pass, the most-
unlikely group managed to garner about 15 percent of the vote, placing it third, ahead of four other parties.

Whether the Pirates wind up being part of a governing coalition is still to be determined. Whether the Pirates grow in numbers, and power, or eventually just fade away, is also still to be determined. But they are on the job at the moment.

A parliamentary government, of course, is a different animal from our own kind of democracy. No one expects to see a newly formed Pirate Party soon holding seats in the U.S. Congress.

But still, people will look at the Pirates and their supporters, ascribe their successes to some sort of general unhappiness with the situation at hand, and endeavor to make a more-or-less direct comparison with the ascension of reality TV star Donald Trump in the United States. Trump, they’ll note, played on people’s economic fears. So too, at least to a point, did the Pirates. The Trumpkins, like those who backed the Pirates, were tired of the status quo and wanted to knock over the apple cart.

The comparisons will go on and on, but they should, and can, go only so far.

Because Iceland isn’t America. With a total population of about 332,000, the entire island nation contains roughly 70 percent of the population of Hampden County, Mass. Look for Iceland’s place on a list of the world’s top 100 nations ranked by annual gross domestic product, and you’ll be searching in vain – it comes in 112th. Iceland has no standing army.

But it’s got the Pirate Party.

And that, like the Norse legends of yore and Bjork’s music today, is interesting in its own right.

– The Springfield
(Mass.) Republican