Election special

A small country goes to the polls this weekend to elect a new parliament after a very hectic six months. A country with a thousand-year history and an innate sense of independence, but which has nevertheless been repeatedly bullied into submission and poverty by its more powerful neighbours. A country which thought it had found riches, only to have the recent global crisis brutally expose the weakness of its economic model: a model which, at times, seemed to be based entirely on banking and shopping.

The last opinion polls predict a historic victory for the social democrats, after decades of hegemony by a centre-right party far too cosy with the nation's bankers. In recent years, it has seemed that the banks were supporting the state, not the other way round.

Everyone agrees that some sort of change is needed. The social democrats support EU membership, while the centre-right wants simply to revise the current agreements. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what sort of deal they would be able to get from Brussels or (at least as importantly) from Frankfurt and the City of London.

The population are understandably worried. What will be the cost of unraveling the excesses of recent years? How can the prosperity of the nation's children be assured? Or will it all just end up with yet more of the stunning wilderness concreted over by foreign "investors" who couldn't even find the country on a map? Those foreign "investors" are already trying to impose their own terms, with varying degrees of tact and diplomacy, yet surely their "solutions" are just more of the same, exactly what got the nation into its current problems…

The polls are open from 09:00 to 19:00 Central European Summer Time on Sunday 26 April. The country is Andorra, not Iceland. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, but I'll let you know the results when I get them ;)