hopelessly fractured

Comrades,

People keep coming up to me in the street and asking "what on earth is going on with the Miracle of Democracy in Iceland, Craves?".
Why would I have any idea?
All I know is it's hopelessly fractured.
After the weekend's snap general election for the 63 seat Althing [the oldest Parliament in the world est. 930AD], try and work out what these final results mean:

Bright Future: 0 seats, down 4, 1.2%
Progressive Party: 8 seats, break even, 10.7%
Reform Party: 4 seats, down 3, 6.7%
Independence Party: 16 seats, down 5, 25.2%
Peoples’ Party: 4 seats, a new party, 6.9%
Centre Party: 7 seats, another new party, 10.9%
Pirate Party: 6 seats, down 4, 9.2%
Peoples’ Front of Iceland: 0 seats, 0.2%
Social Democrats: 7 seats, up 4, 12.1%
Dawn: 0 seats, 0.1%
Left-Greens: 11 seats, up 1, 16.9%

Crikey!
It seems Iceland isn't wanting a Bright Future at the minute, and the Centre Party, formed just three weeks before the election, picked up a startling seven seats, as Icelanders drifted in on a floe from the left and right to the centre.
The scandal-plagued former senior coalition partner, the Independence Party, lost five seats, but still managed to get the majority of votes.
But forming a Govt. will be ridiculously difficult.
A two-party coalition won't cut the mustard numbers-wise, a three-mob coalition is on the cards, but the Independents hate everyone else's guts, and vice-versa, so there will be some hard bargaining and banging of heads together going down.
There's even talk of the possibility of a five-way coalition, for chrissake.
Like last time, when it took three months to sort out, Iceland's President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, will again just sit on his haunches for as long as it takes waiting for someone to come along and say "Hey there Pres. I can form a Govt.!"
It was a shame to see the anarcho-socialist Pirate Party lose four of their ten seats, after their leader, the loopy "poetician" Birgitta Jónsdóttir retired, so their chances of making Reykjavík the capital of the New World Order have been dashed for the time being.
Pinko hopes that the Left-Greens would storm ahead didn't come to pass, so it's unlikely although not impossible that Iceland will veer off to a left wing Govt. for only the second time since Independence in 1944.
The whole post-poll shootin' match will be about as inscrutable as the Icelandic language itself.
248,502 ballots were cast, which works out at just under four thousand voters per seat.
Tiny numbers, so each vote carries quite a bit of heft.
It mustn't be that hard to get elected; you could personally ring up that many people at random out of the phonebook and try to bribe them, or just ask them, to vote for you.

PS>
Going a bit off topic here, but I stumbled into a bookshop in town the other day and saw that Kevin Rudd's lavishly produced auto-biography, Not for the Faint Hearted - A Personal Reflection on Life, Politics and Purpose, was already on the remainder table at a bargain basement price of $35.
It was ten bucks cheaper than Jimmy Barnes' Working Class Man.
And what a doorstopper that'd hold anything open in a gale it is - coming in at a whopping 627 pages.
Obviously, he didn't have an editor who could say "Aw, c'mon Kev, you're not writing 'War and Peace' here, mate".
It had an extensive index too, and I'm kicking myself now for not having a closer look to see if the entry "Chinese, Mandarin", was followed by "Chinese, ratfucked".