Iceland review - 2015, Page 59

ICELAND REVIEW 57
POLITICS
PHOTOS BY PÁLL STEFÁNSSON.
to the poll, Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s
(center) Progressive Party had 10.8 percent support while the
other coalition partner, the (centre-right) Independence Party,
traditionally the country’s largest, had 21.9 percent. The other
main opposition parties had between 8.3 and 10.8 percent sup-
port. The Pirates first polled as the top party in mid-March.
“I haven’t celebrated yet,” Birgitta replies. “A couple of months
ago, polls showed that we had become bigger than the Left-
Greens (which, with the center-left Social Democrats, formed
the previous government from 2009-2013). A friend of mine said
I should celebrate. I said ‘nah, let’s wait until we’re bigger than
the Social Democrats,’ which were the third largest party but I
never thought that would happen. But it did and now we’re the
biggest party.”
Birgitta has just returned from a democracy convention in
Barcelona and is off to Washington as a member of the Icelandic
parliament’s foreign affairs committee a couple of days later. The
second of the three Pirate Party MPs, Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson,
is even more difficult to get hold of these days. “We’re drowning
at the moment. Things are just crazy in parliament right now,”
he tells me over the phone when I try to arrange to meet him
during the final days of parliament before summer recess. Jón Þór
Ólafsson completes the Pirate trio in parliament. However, he
announced before this issue went to print that he would step aside
in the autumn to make way for another member who has special
knowledge of EU issues, among other fields. “It’s no longer nec-
essary for me to be in parliament for the Pirates to achieve their
main goals,” he told Fréttablaðið, adding that he would continue
as a volunteer.
POLITICAL SHIFT
Formed in late 2012 by Birgitta, Helgi and others, Iceland’s Pirate
Party is among more than 40 parties under the pirate label—
which refers to copyright rather than piracy at sea—to be estab-
lished around the world, since the formation of the first in Sweden
in 2006. The Icelandic party went on to rewrite history, becoming
the first pirate party in the world to enter a national parliament
after winning 5.1 percent of the vote (just above the 5 percent
minimum threshold required to secure representation) and three
seats out of a total of 63 in the 2013 national election. In 2014, the
party received 5.9 percent of the vote in the municipal elections in
Reykjavík, earning them one member on the City Council.
“You need to look at the last ten years to understand the devel-
opments in politics today,” Birgitta says, referring to the remnants
of the 2008 financial collapse. “People have completely lost
patience in being lied to in the aftermath of the crisis. The main
lessons from the collapse are that there is little transparency in
government, there is absolutely no accountability and there is no
path for whistleblowers. There is also no legal path for the public
to change bad policies. There are so many committees doing a lot
of work but the solutions are never implemented in parliament.”
Birgitta describes the Pirates as “non-traditional, pragmatic,
liberal, left-wing in relation to the welfare state but not extreme or
radical.” You also won’t find any neocons or far-left people in the
party. “They’re not real pirates, at least,” says Birgitta, who defines
herself as a “pragmatic anarchist” and as a “poet-ician” rather than
a politician.
Opposite page (from
left to right): The Pirate
Party’s representatives in
parliament: Helgi Hrafn
Gunnarsson, Birgitta
Jónsdóttir and Jón Þór
Ólafsson.
Right: From a series of
protests outside Iceland’s
parliament in February 2014
in response to government
plans to withdraw the
country from EU accession
talks without putting the
matter to a referendum. The
placard shows the finance
minister, prime minister and
a Progressive Party MP.