Depending on whose estimate you believe, as much as 10% of the population of Iceland demonstrated outside Parliament yesterday, and everyone agrees that they were the largest demonstrations in Icelandic history (and possibly the largest demonstrations, proportionally of any country in history).
While the PM initially refused to contemplate resigning over the scandal, the BBC reports that he has now asked the President to dissolve Parliament, which will prompt snap elections.
I speculate that this may be driven by the PM’s inability to hold together his coalition government. All government business was cancelled yesterday as the center-right coalition met to negotiate their response to the leaks.
A recent poll put Iceland’s Pirate Party – who’ve previously called for asylum and diplomatic passports for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange – as the party most likely to form a government if elections were called.
Why isn’t Tumblr freaking out about the biggest leak in history?
The Panama Papers are information that has the potential to change the world and this story broke over 2 hours ago now. Putin might go to prison. Same with the Saudi-Arabian king Salman ibn Abd al-Asis, the Ukranian president Petro Poroschenko, the former Georgian prime minister Bidsina Iwanischwili, the Argentinian president Mauricio Macri, a quarter of the Icelandic cabinet, 11 other world leaders, and ‘best soccer player of all time’ Lionel Messi.
This is 2.6 terabytes of leaked data about tax evasion and off-shore companies, drug trade, etc etc etc. Remember Wikileaks? That was huge, right? The Panama Papers dwarf the 1.7GB of data we got out of that.
Tumblr backup 