The chairperson of Bright Future has dismissed an idea to team up with Iceland’s two left-wing parties for municipal elections next spring.
With mayor Jón Gnarr recently announcing that he will not run again, his Best Party will be no more. However, Bright Future – the sister party of the Best Party – will most likely be running in municipal elections in 2014.
Recently, former Social Democrat city councilperson Stefán Jón Hafstein floated the idea that, in order to fill the power vacuum left by Gnarr, the Social Democrats, Left-Greens and Bright Future should rather form a “leftist alliance” and run as a single unit.
Vísir now reports that Bright Future chairperson Guðmundur Steingrímsson has rejected this idea as being a part of “binary politics”.
“I have grown so tired – and Bright Future was not founded for this purpose – of taking part in this two-tower talk, these binary politics,” said Guðmundur, who previously hailed from the Social Democrats and the Progressives. “We look at politics as a multi-poled platform and a more complex arena than these two poles; leftists on one hand and the Independence Party on the other.”
Stefán’s idea is not a new one. In fact, he was on Reykjavík city council as a part of a leftist alliance known as Reykjavíkurlistinn, which ran the city during much of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Bright Future has at times been identified as a decidedly centrist party, although they have often emphasised their unwillingness to identify with being anywhere on the political compass.
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