So Strong, yet So Weak: The Emergence of Protest Publics in Iceland in the Wake of the Financial Crisis (original) (raw)

So Strong, yet So Weak: The Emergence of Protest Publics in Iceland in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

Jón Ólafsson

1 Introduction: It’s About Trust

In his classical piece on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau argues that civic duties go beyond simply expressing or affirming one’s opinion in a system which will then either select or reject that opinion. He writes: “I cast my vote perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that the right will prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. . . Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it” (Thoreau 1970, p. 460). Moreover, once the majority has finally come to vote for the right cause, it most probably shows that the issue itself has become irrelevant for some reason of “expediency.” Thoreau remains convinced that majority opinion, even if right, may just as well be for the wrong reason.

Thoreau’s moral stance places civic duty above democratic procedure-even if not above democracy itself. A democratic government has limited power, and one of the limitations on its power is the demands of justice and morality. Citizens have limited means to control government, yet a duty exists to make every effort to prevent government from committing “enormous injustice.” Thoreau’s thinking was fueled by moral outrage over both the US war efforts at the time against Mexico and institutional slavery. It is in his view inconceivable that any citizen could be satisfied with simply being in a minority on such fundamental issues. The citizen’s duty in the face of such “enormous injustice” is to do what is possible to prevent it without regard to consequences for himself or herself.

Trust is at the heart of Thoreau’s concern. The majority rule based on procedural integrity is meant to provide a system of decision-making where the citizen has a well-defined role in influencing choice but must also recognize the limits of this role and trust government. But to trust is not to acquiesce in immoral policies-it rather

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J. Ólafsson ( ⊠\boxtimes )
University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
e-mail: jonolafs@hi.is ↩︎

implies a civic duty to refuse to go along with such policies regardless of majority opinion.

Thoreau’s moral outrage provides an interesting analogy with the public outrage in Iceland after the financial collapse of 2008. Differences about policy issues were perceived at a much deeper level than previously and elites seen as having betrayed public trust. Now a decade later, it may seem a little difficult to fully grasp the magnitude and depth of the outrage, which spurred months of grassroots activity and permanently changed the Icelandic political landscape after the crisis. Countries go through economic crises without revolutions-what was so special in Iceland? Trust is central: the financial collapse showed how badly trust had been misplaced-and that created a moral outrage. In a Thoreauean fashion, protesters seemed spontaneously to find a common ground in protesting the “enormous injustice” done by technically bankrupting the country and leaving a large part of the population exposed to the caprice of financial institutions (see Sveinsson 2013, p. 223).

In street protests, a full moral reversal was loudly demanded as well as an open acknowledgment of guilt. Thus, the financial crash, which almost led to a national bankruptcy, caused a crisis, much deeper than any previous economic crisis in Iceland. It was not the economic crisis as such that led to prolonged protest action (Bernburg 2016, p. 11). The danger of national bankruptcy-quite real for some time-was averted, and economic recovery came relatively quickly. But trust did not return, and criticism of government, expressed so vocally when the crisis hit, was transformed into-as it seems-a permanently cynical view of party politics and government policies (Johnsen and Sigurgeirsdóttir 2018). Therefore, I will argue that the collapse of trust in government experienced by a previously rather acquiescent public in Iceland transformed the political environment by the emergence of an easily mobilized “protest public,” i.e., a public unsuppressed by the elite structure of representative politics and able to self-organize when confronted with oppressive or corrupt policies and practices. I will also show, however, that even if authorities have had to reckon with this new reality, it has not-so far-led to a deeper change in democratic politics.

I will first explain how moral outrage appears as an underlying issue in protest action and political demands by groups that were activated by the crisis. Next, I will discuss expectations and subsequent disappointment of a reform-minded public. I will then give an overview of democratic innovations as well as activist groups and postcrisis parties, whose success strongly indicates an erosion of established political structures with the emergence of protest publics, and finally I will show how the political establishment remains unbroken, although the constantly open possibility of mass mobilization has left its mark on democratic politics and has certainly created a political role for a new kind of publics-being empowered by a series of successful protest, where government policy has actually been shifted as a result of protest action and clearly expressed, yet spontaneous, public unity. January 2009 was only the beginning. The Icesave referenda in 2010 and 2011 are also among these cases, and so is action spurred by EU membership application disputes in 2014 and the Panama Papers scandal in 2016.

2 Moral Mobilization

Surveys made during the crisis suggested that it had caused family life and social justice to be valued more and money and material goods less than had been the case during the years of economic boom. Some public commentators even argued that the crisis had led to a reflective engagement about values of life, which suggested that in some sense the crisis also had positive effects (Jóhannesson 2009, p. 359). The importance of common values was frequently the topic of public debates, and some groups even argued that Icelanders should find a way to commonly articulate some fundamental values of Icelandic society, in an effort to restore the “social contract” (see Maurabúfan 2009).

Before the crisis political and media discourse was bristling with self-congratulatory rhetoric, where for some the main task was to explain why the Icelandic nation had turned out to be so great and successful (see, e.g., Forsætisráduneyti 2008; Winterman 2006). After the crisis of 2008, however, a more realistic self-image appeared. Icelanders now saw themselves as victims of greed, corruption, and incompetence. Monitoring agencies were paralyzed and the authorities both unable and unwilling to deal with that situation (Sigurgeirsdottir and Wade 2012; Gylfason 2013a).

The attention to basic moral and social values-moral condemnation of the government, which had not only failed to avert the crisis (no one argued that it could have) but failed both to honestly acknowledge the danger and to prepare the country institutionally and politically-created a situation where moral improvement was loudly demanded as a necessary step in renewing the democratic system (Boyes 2009). Community trust became the opposite of trust in government: trust in fellow citizens seemed to grow as trust in government collapsed. Thus, it would seem that serious and detailed reform plans, even if radical, could have been successfully proposed by activist groups (Jeffrey et al. 2015, pp. 6-8).

The series of events that since have been referred to as the “pots and pans revolution” can be seen as the direct consequence of this double reversal of trust where the citizens turned away from the government and to each other. Facing public distrust on an unprecedented scale, the government resigned in early 2009 (Bergmann 2014, pp. 145-146). The nature of these events was quite different from the kind of protest seen in other European countries at the same time. While street action never degenerated into violence and the political changes were all within the constitutional order, public action from October 2008, when the crisis hit, to February 2009, when the government collapsed, was widely perceived to be revolutionary, a collapse-at least temporary-of political order (see Sveinsson 2013; Magnússon 2013).

Widespread and deep distrust of institutions and administrative and political practices fundamentally changed the relations between the government and public (Vilhelmsdóttir and Kristinsson 2018). Between 1991 and 2008, Iceland had a stable center-right government led by the liberal conservative Independence Party. During this time the opposition was unorganized and without much influence on policymaking. As the Independence Party changed its coalition partner in 2007 from the

rural-based Progressive Party to the Social Democrats, a certain shift toward more socially oriented politics was expected by some, but the change was largely cos-metic-with the Social Democrats filling a vacuum left by the Progressives (Pálsson 2007). When three Icelandic banks-with huge international portfolios-went bankrupt just a year later and had to be taken over by the government, the policies shaped by the Independence Party, which in previous years had been seen as successful, were exposed: policies of the government in the years of the economic boom preceding the crisis including the privatization of banks were now seen as faulty or-worse-as fraudulent (Gylfason 2013a; Johnsen 2016).

The debates in the media, on the streets, and on the emerging social media were dominated by grassroots activists who called for a radical revision of Iceland’s political culture, but participation was steadily growing (Bernburg 2016, p. 49). Public discussion was transformed. It reached the level of the political: instead of ordinary (ontic) debate about policies, values were discussed at a deeper (ontological) level (Mouffe 2005, p. 9). Abstract concepts became the common currency: public discussion frequently made explicit reference to a (now broken) “social contract” (Júlfusson and Helgason 2013). It was asked what fundamental reforms were necessary to renew such a contract, and it was not seen as extreme or marginal to demand total social and political renewal even to the extent of founding a “new republic” (Njarðvík 2009, 2010). The mood was hostile to the government in general-it was not an expression of a desire for dialogue or a more deliberative discursive environment but rather about other forms of control: about ways to engage the public directly in decision-making (Rushton 2014).

This-partly-presented a populist appeal to the “public will,” but interestingly many activists referred more to the epistemic justification of participatory approaches than to a necessity to subject policies to direct populist control (Ólafsson 2016).

The goal at first was therefore not to reach an “ideal deliberative consensus” but to establish a new hegemony through which corrupt and incompetent public institutions could be overtaken and subjected to decision-making truly committed to the common good. Therefore, the moral outrage was directed not toward the moral discourse underlying deliberative aspects of representative democracy but rather toward political discourse as such, seeking to transform it and break the dominance of elites empowered by the party system. So here we have the revolutionary element-a total transformation of political discourse-which would submit decision-making to public control thereby ensuring a corresponding moral transformation (Guðmundsson 2009). This also made the symbolic power of pots and pans so strong: the presentation of pragmatism and common sense-kitchen logic.

The financial collapse radicalized grassroots movements in Iceland to an extent that had hardly been seen in Northern Europe since the interwar years. They also changed the political dialogue since their aim was to change the rules and culture of democratic politics-not only to create a civic/government forum for public engagement. The public mood was-to use Chantal Mouffe’s term-antagonistic (Mouffe 2000). Activist groups and the emerging protest publics aimed at shattering elite solidarity-to replace the elites. This is what made the situation in Iceland-for a

while-similar to the situation in some Eastern European countries during the fall of Communism. Nothing less than wholesale revision of social and political values was demanded. The first part of this transformative enterprise was successful. Overnight protest became a part of the political vocabulary, i.e., if previously protest action had been limited to social movements, it was now a part of a much more general public engagement. The second part however, as I will argue, was less successful than the first.

3 Expectations of a Newly Emerged Protest Public

One of the most visible events expressing civic outrage in the wake of the 2008 crisis was a “citizens’ meeting” in the largest cinema theatre in Reykjavík where a newly founded citizens’ association invited all MPs, including government ministers, to participate in a discussion about the crisis and its causes. The hall was packed and large crowds also gathered outside where it was possible to see on a big screen what was going on in the hall itself. The meeting was also broadcast directly by national TV. First some invited speakers gave short talks on which the politicians were then invited to comment. They and speakers then took questions from the audience. 1{ }^{1}

Most of the MPs who belonged to the coalition parties came only reluctantly to the meeting. Some of them however saw it as something they simply could not ignore-even though they were skeptical about the new grassroots movements. These encounters and the discussion that evolved between the politicians, the activist speakers, and the people in the audience were rather awkward and in some cases involved mockery and cynicism rather than respectful exchange of views (Fréttablaðið 2008).

The audience eventually got quite upset when the foreign minister, who was also the leader of one of the coalition parties-the Social Democrats-suggested that the audience could not claim to represent “the people,” rather it represented simply themselves. 2{ }^{2} The reaction to this comment was quite hostile at the meeting itself and in the days that followed it also was widely ridiculed on social media and elsewhere. Activists and civic groups saw it as illustrating the gap between the government and the public. It can also be seen as the classic example of a politician failing to understand changes as they happen. The ministers were faced with a new kind of public, not the somewhat irritable and argumentative groups they were used to

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1{ }^{1} The meeting was a part of a series of meetings organized by a new organization, the Civic Action Association. The meetings were well documented, and considerable material about them can be found on the group’s website, borgarafundur.info. See http://www.borgarafundur.info/?page\_ id=51\mathrm{id}=51 for recordings of the meeting discussed here, which was held on 24 November 2008.
2{ }^{2} An amateur recording of the remarks is available on youtube.com, “Púað á Ingibjörgu Sólrúnu.” Her exact words were (my translation): “I am not sure that those in the audience can necessarily claim to be talking on behalf of the nation, or have the right to… [booing and shouting from the audience] . . . that’s it.” ↩︎

dealing with, but with activists who had not necessarily engaged in any political activity before the crisis and who saw themselves as representing not the public in some numerical sense but the moral indignation caused by the government’s betrayal. Eventually the unrest on the streets, constant criticism of the government, and increasing distrust toward the public administration created insecurity within the coalition parties themselves. Finally, the Social Democrats pulled out and the government collapsed.

All put together it seems fair to say that public criticism of the government, both of its pre-crisis policies and its reaction to the crisis which came from grassroots movements and directly from the public in citizen meetings and demonstrations and on social media, was sharp, focused, and widely shared. The crisis was of course understood to be caused by the international situation through which the Icelandic banks had become insolvent. But it was not an international financial crisis that caused the unrest in Iceland, but rather two characteristics of Icelandic politics and public service: incompetence and corruption. These two explanations of how badly Iceland had handled the crisis were frequently expressed:

The public administration had failed because of incompetence caused partly by a long tradition of corrupt hiring practices. Governing parties had consistently politicized key appointments-ranked loyalty and support over professional ability, education, and experience (WGE 2010, pp. 141-143; Gylfason 2013a, p. 402).
Deep and long-standing corruption among top members of the political elite meant that some of the privatizations (including the banks’) for which Iceland had been lauded internationally had in fact been a handing out of public property to favored individuals and groups (Bernburg and Víkingsdóttir 2016, pp. 88-89).

As the crisis evolved, incompetence and corruption were more and more seen to necessitate a complete overhaul of the political system. New practices would have to be created within the government and in the public sector in general. A new government should be committed to improving politics through systemic reforms, both political and administrative (Boyes 2009, pp. 192-195).

The expectations that these goals were possible came from the new grassroots and activist groups. Yet it was not obvious to everyone that the economic crisis should be seen as necessitating such change, even given the loudly expressed moral outrage. In the months after the collapse of the banks, many had argued to the contrary claiming that it was both for the best of the country and the responsibility of the sitting government that it should deal with the crisis, not run away from it. As grassroots activity increased and more became public about how the government had failed to do what it could have done to reduce the risk that the banks would bring down the Icelandic economy, the less convincing was the argument that the same government should continue (Jóhannesson 2009, pp. 288-289). But protesters and activists did not follow up on this-the transition to a new minority government followed not only constitutional norms but was fully according to established political tradition. That was also the end of the revolution. One argument frequently made during this period was based on the observation that the financial sector was heavily male

dominated in Iceland as elsewhere and that in fact men were to blame for the financial collapse. This leads to a demand that women’s leadership should be sought in the restoration of the Icelandic economy and female values emphasized. A movement named “Women’s Emergency Government” was founded to strengthen this platform, but its effects were minor (Pálsdóttir 2008).

The pots and pans revolution was eventually contained by the political eliteswithout much effort as it seemed, after the change of government, when the parties of the left, the Left-Green Movement and the Social Democrats, came to power. The relative ease with which the two leftist parties took over spurred suspicions on the right wing that the demonstrations in the weeks before had been stage directed by leading figures of the Left-Green party, which had not been part of government before (Bragason 2015, p. 62). These suspicions were unfounded but understandable given the conspiratorial atmosphere and the humiliating downfall of the Independence Party. Leftist MPs were often accused of inappropriate liaison with protesters (Sveinsson 2013, p. 225). Later on, frustration also emerged among the activist public where the feeling became widespread that the pots and pans revolution was unfinished-a revolution cut short by a political system which remained stable (Sveinsson 2013, pp. 72-73). After a brief period of a left-wing minority government, the parties forming it got a slim majority in fresh parliamentary elections. Although activist leaders continued to insist on the need for a revolution and revolutionary change and various scenarios of renewal were suggested, no plans seem to have been harbored by any group about some kind of nonconstitutional paths to such renewal (Þorsteinsson 2016).

Given the circumstances which brought the leftist government to power, its task was fairly complicated-if not impossible. Not only were there a collapsed economy to bring on its feet again and an international reputation in shambles-which meant, e.g., low credit rating and therefore extremely difficult loan conditions. The grassroots movements continued to be highly active pressing for political renewal including serious efforts to create participatory mechanisms, seen by many as the way to rebuild trust and prevent the formation of a new government-business coalition against public interest. The new left-wing government also showed all indications in its rhetoric of wanting to institute major political reforms, bringing the government closer to the people: first hiring policies would be changed to ensure that the most competent (rather than the most loyal) people would be recruited. Then decisions would be made more transparent to ensure integrity (Fréttablaðið 2009).

The new government also pledged to work on changing the culture of debate and policy-making within government and legislature and to increase public consultation. In short, the government promised to make democracy more deliberative in an effort to create a national unity around an economic renewal (Stjórnarráðið 2009a). A deliberative model is based on consensus on certain basic issues where parties to public debate refrain from polemics and useless antagonisms. Such a model thus requires not only that the participants see themselves as having a common goal and sincerely wanting to work toward it. They also must interpret the goal, their interests, views, and values in a similar way and have the same or at least very similar measure of success (Gutmann and Thompson 2004).

The new government thus wanted to show itself to be committed to working with the groups that had created political atmosphere in which its taking power looked like the conclusion of a successful revolution. The goals outlined in the first coalition agreement between the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement were described in more detail in a second agreement, made after these two parties were able to form a majority government after elections were held in April 2009. The coalition agreements therefore seemed to begin with to concur with the demands from the street although made in a language that lacked revolutionary undertones except insofar as leftist policies were announced and a commitment to fostering a Nordic welfare society (Stjórnarráðið 2009b).

The government however clearly underestimated the distrust toward the political establishment caused by the crisis. Its declared goals may have been too lofty and too ambitious. While they spoke to the demands of the street protest, they did not suffice to bridge the gap between grassroots and government. The lack of a clear political agenda does not mean that there were no clear expectations. Activists, fueled by moral outrage, also had moral goals, and the expectation was that the new government would fulfill some (or all) of those goals. Moreover, the leftist government was not averse to these goals. But to ensure success, activists and public organizations needed to work together-the government needed to recognize the “new” public-and from their side, activists needed to transit from antagonism to agonism. This however did not happen, and, arguably, the government lost the opportunity to win over the public. That could in part explain its unpopularity, which had become considerable already within the first year after its formation.

If the pre-crisis, acquiescent (dominated) public is seen as a counter-public transformed by the crisis (the pots-and-pans-wielding ordinary people become a dominant public), the government seems severely limited by its inability to face this new reality. It continues the suspicion expressed by the foreign minister at the citizens’ meeting. As a result, the deliberative moment is lost, and the protest public remains stuck in its role of reacting to government proposals (Peshkopia 2008, p. 33; Dewey 2008, pp. 233-234).

4 The Special Investigation Commission and a Constituent Assembly

So far, I have tried to show how what was seen as the particular Icelandic failure in responding to the international crisis caused widespread moral outrage, which led to spontaneous grassroots activity, and group formation that transformed political engagement. The central parliament square in Reykjavík served as a regular gathering spot, and when action was at its height, the whole city center was bustling with activity.

The government responded in two ways to the strong demand for a moral renewal: first by appointing a committee-sometimes compared to South Africa’s

Truth and Reconciliation Commission-to investigate what had gone wrong before the crisis and second (this happened after the change of government) by passing a law on the election of a Constituent Assembly to revise the Icelandic constitution.

The so-called Special Investigation Commission was formed in December 2008 to investigate how Iceland’s government and public administration had failed and what could explain that the Icelandic government was neither prepared for the acute crisis of the banking system nor for the aftermath, although the Icelandic leadership had received sufficient information at home and abroad to show clearly that such preparations were needed. The report subsequently published, detailed the faults in how the Icelandic governmental practice had developed over the years. A specially appointed Working Group on Ethics worked with the Commission to provide an ethical analysis in addition to the report itself (SIC 2010a; Johnsen 2014; Árnason 2010).

The WGE report concluded, among other things, that Icelandic politics had been immature and Icelandic politicians had failed to develop the discursive culture of democracy where its debates present attempts to reach the best solution rather than an attempt to convince the audience and defeat the opponent. Various characteristics of Icelandic political and administrative traditions are then detailed to reveal practices that either reflected incompetence, corruption, or both (WGE 2010, pp. 179-180).

The findings of the investigative commission largely concurred with the demands from grassroots activists. One obvious conclusion from reading the report concerned democracy itself. It was clear that the government had failed both because of a lack of democratic as well as administrative competence but also that it had become a victim of systemic corruption since it had in fact more and more come to see itself in the role of serving the interests of Iceland’s international companies, rather than being accountable to the public directly.

The Special Investigation Commission saw it as one of the main tasks of an Icelandic postcrisis government to professionalize public administration. But it did not see increased democratic participation or direct public engagement in policy- and decision-making as an important goal. It therefore in fact failed to address the deep democratic discontent that the crisis had created and grassroots movements most strongly expressed. The Commission, whose members were two senior legal specialists and a professor of economics, recommended some legal and economic action. The Working Group on Ethics-composed of the specialists on ethics and one historian-emphasized that institutional structures needed to be strengthened (SIC 2010b; Árnason 2010, p. 119; WGE 2010, pp. 242-243). Neither the commission nor the working group emphasized public engagement or recommended that the government should reach out to different groups that had been instrumental in creating an atmosphere that made governmental change inescapable.

Therefore, even though regular protest action died down once a new government had been formed, the dissonance between democratic rhetoric and democratic demands on the one hand, evolving governmental policy on the other, steadily grew. The government however made one move which appealed strongly to activists: it announced that it would convene a Constituent Assembly to revise the Icelandic constitution. While such a revision was long overdue, the Icelandic

constitution adopted in 1944 was considered too close to its predecessor, the Danish constitution, as well as dated in many respects (Sigurðardóttir 1996).

It was a generally accepted view that considerable rewriting was necessary, since the text of the constitution was to a considerable extent a nineteenth-century relic. The text contains formulations, articles, and provisions whose meaning is obscure without historical commentary (Stjórnarráðið 2009b, p. 14). The Constitutional Assembly was elected in 2010, but due to technical flaws in how the elections were conducted, the Supreme Court invalidated the elections (Hæstiréttur 2011). The parliament then reappointed the candidates who had been elected to the Constitutional Assembly to form the Constitutional Council. The Council was given the official task of preparing a bill with a revised constitution and asked to consider a number of issues in particular, including the organization of the legislative and executive powers, the role and position of the president, the independence of the courts and provisions about elections, and the constituency system (Stjórnlagaráð 2011). The council submitted a constitutional bill to the parliament in 2011, but the parliament failed to pass the new constitution before its term ended in April 2013 (Gylfason 2013b; Ólafsson 2016).

The Special Investigative Committee and the Constituent Assembly were attempts to regain trust and respond to the powerful public demand for moral reckoning. The SIC report was seen as a successful-if limited-investigation of what had gone wrong. The Constitutional effort on the other hand failed. Neither project substantively contributed to reestablishing trust in government (Johnsen and Sigurgeirsdóttir 2018).

5 Democratic Experiments and Innovations

If the Special Investigation Commission and the Constituent Assembly were the exercises in deliberative democracy that the public had demanded, the results were disappointing. The SIC produced a huge report which to some extent exposed the fraudulent activities of the banks before the crisis, but it did not in any obvious way suggest reforms in the way protesting publics seemed to be calling for-let alone recognize the transformed moral-political discourse of the Icelandic postcrisis society. Vilhjálmur Árnason who led the Working Group on Ethics has in numerous subsequent papers expressed serious doubts about the postcrisis grassroots movements, arguing that the emphasis on direct democracy have been counterproductive and, in many ways, served to spoil efforts to strengthen the institutional basis of democracy in Iceland (Árnason 2013, 2016, 2018). So already with the submission of its report, the gap seemed to be widening between postcrisis protest publics and the postcrisis government.

Many political projects were generated directly and indirectly by postcrisis public engagement. These projects were quite diverse, but they all shared the morally loaded vision of reform. Success varied, but the postcrisis discourse that gradually took shape was based on the same premise of moral failure. I will now give a brief overview and assessment of these projects (see also Ólafsson 2014).

5.1 The Citizens’ Movement

Already in 2008, a group of people most of whom had not previously been associated with political parties formed a movement which came to be called Borgarahreyfingin (The Citizens’ Movement). The name was inspired by the Czech Civic Forum, which had played a key role in bringing down the Communist government in Czechoslovakia some 19 years earlier. In their rhetoric some of the early participants in the movement also made a found there to be a connection between the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the crisis in Iceland.

The Citizens’ Movement registered as a political party and subsequently won four seats in the parliamentary elections of 2009. The movement however was soon consumed by internal strife. Contradictions between the practice of parliamentary politics and militant radicalism led to various splits within the group and eventually to its collapse. A few months after the elections, three of its MPs had split from the rest of the group and formed a new party-The Movement. One had joined the Left-Green Movement and thus become a part of the governmental majority (Tryggvadóttir 2014).

The Citizens’ Movement displayed all the weaknesses of a spontaneous grassroots activism. Coordination was mostly absent and the expectations of members so diversified that the task of forming policies and working within preexisting structures was simply too complicated and oppressive. After the parliamentary group had left the Citizens’ Movement and created the Movement, it was able to maintain a strong presence within the parliament during its tenure from 2009 to 2013 (Tryggvadóttir 2014, pp. 125-132).

The Pirate Party, which gradually took over as the movement that united many of the grassroots activists and continued the strong and sometimes moralistic pro-reform discourse, put up candidates for the elections in 2013 and just made the 5%5 \% barrier, getting three MPs elected. The Pirates unlike the Citizens’ Movement based their work on clear political principles and maintained an organizational structure robust enough to keep the movement from disintegrating. Their strength has grown. In 2016 they got 10 MPs elected and in 2017 retained 6 (out of a total number of 63) (Píratar 2018).

5.2 The National Forums

In early 2009 a group of people mainly from business and industry formed a move-ment-the so-called anthill movement-to promote alternative means for policymaking based on the general idea, adapted from the bestselling book The Wisdom of Crowds, that harnessing the “wisdom of the many” could help articulate the common good beyond what traditional politicians were capable of (Maurabúfan 2009).

The anthill movement convened the first National Forum in November of 2009. Its task was to express and rank the core values of Icelandic society. The methodology came mainly from goal- and value-setting strategies used in the private sector,

when employees of a company, or employees and stakeholders, are invited to participate in the choice of values, main goals, and priorities of a company or corporation. The government emulated the anthill method in a second National Forum in 2010 whose task was to articulate basic values that should guide the revision of the constitution. In both forums it was strongly suggested that only a randomly selected assembly would be able to part with political discourse of the past to think about the future from an entirely new perspective (Pjóðfundur 2010). During the next few years, this form of citizen meetings became the standard way for government to consult with the public (Forsætisráduneyti 2010).

5.3 The Icesave Referenda

According to the current Icelandic constitution, the president has a partial veto power over legislation passed by the parliament. If the president refuses to sign the legislation, it takes effect only temporarily but is to be put to a national referendum. In 2010 and 2011 the Icelandic parliament passed controversial bills ratifying agreements with the United Kingdom and Holland in which Iceland admitted responsibility for partially covering losses of individual owners of savings accounts in the British and Dutch branches of the collapsed bank Landsbankinn. The president, having received petitions from a considerable part of Icelandic voters, decided in both cases to refuse signing the bill (Grímsson 2010, 2011). The latter refusal surprised many observers since in the meantime a greatly improved agreement had been reached and most specialists thought that Icelanders could hardly get a better deal. Both referenda resulted in a rejection of the proposed legislation. Many of those who opposed the presidential veto argued that the case was unsuitable for a referendum, since the content of the agreement and the economic consequences were too complicated for most people to understand fully. But when, after having twice had an agreement rejected by the public, the Icelandic government won its case against the British and the Dutch governments in the EFTA court and turned out not to be liable to pay a deposit guarantee to individual account holders, for some, it became less obvious that the public should not be consulted about complicated financial issues (Finnbogason 2015).

5.4 The International Modern Media Initiative

In the wake of the sensational publications of secret governmental documents by WikiLeaks, a group of Icelanders who had been involved in various ways with the organization started lobbying in the Icelandic parliament that Iceland should take a step toward revolutionary legislation that would secure an unprecedented level of free speech protection for media and individuals. The initiative led to interesting developments in the parliament, which at first passed a resolution on special steps

toward a new legislation on media freedom and freedom of expression stating that Iceland would aim at leading the way for other countries in this respect. The resolution was passed with a broad support in the parliament. Subsequent discussion about the consequences of the WikiLeaks revelations created doubts among parliamentarians who eventually were unwilling to face the risk involved in taking the lead internationally in promoting freedom of speech (Alpingi 2010). IMMI has not been a strong presence in subsequent discussion on issues related to freedom of information. Yet it has to some extent been a part of the ongoing discussion about legislation to protect freedom of information and the right to disclosure of information for the public good. A working group appointed in early 2018 to make proposals on such legislation is an indirect result of the initiative (Stjórnarráðið 2018).

5.5 Participatory Budgeting: Better Reykjavik

In 2010, the City of Reykjavík began to collaborate with a group of web designers on creating web-based tools to enable individuals to have a direct say in policy matters within the city council. A special web was opened called Better Reykjavík where people could comment on planned projects, start initiatives, and offer project ideas and solutions which city officials were obligated to consider. Citizens were also asked to vote on proposed projects and rank them within certain budgetary restraints. Thus, Better Reykjavík has led to a miniature version of participatory budgeting. It has grown over the years both in terms of budget and participation. The platform has also been used for other participatory projects at local and national level. It will most probably also be used in a renewed participatory effort to revise the Icelandic constitution (Reykjavíkurborg 2018).

5.6 Political Transformation: The Best Party

In the municipal elections of 2010, Jón Gnarr, until then first and foremost a wellknown actor and stand-up comedian, led a new party, called the Best Party, which aimed at proposing well-sounding goals, be popular, say what people liked to hear, have fun, and secure Jón and his friend’s stable well-paying jobs. To begin with, the Best Party seemed like the ordinary political parody of Icelandic politics, but there was something more in it: in addition to all the fun, there was a core element of sharp political criticism, which caught on (Hafsteinsdóttir 2011). The “immoral” message that the party delivered during the election campaign subverted the seriousness of the solemn moral message that had characterized Iceland’s postcrisis publics in the preceding years. The Party got a plurality of votes and formed the biggest faction in the city council. Jón Gnarr became mayor of Reykjavík. One could say that of all attempts at political reform in postcrisis Iceland, the Best Party is the most obvious short-term success. The party has to some extent become normalized as just one of

the political parties competing at the municipal level (Boyer 2013, pp. 284-285). Together with the Social Democrats, it managed to create a stable city government and according to opinion polls in the fall of 2013 would still have been the largest party in the municipal council. Jón Gnarr announced at the end of October that year that he would not be running for reelection. The Best Party would not prolong its existence beyond its initial 4-year term. Members of the party who had been active in the city government and wished to continue would do so on the platform of another party, Bright future, founded in 2012. Bright future got six seats in Althingi in the 2013 parliament elections, retained three in 2016 but lost all seats in 2017. The party withdrew from participation in the municipal elections of 2018 (Andersen 2013).

6 Results

Scholarly discussion in Iceland about grassroots activism and democratic initiatives has been critical and sometimes dismissive-intellectuals have to some extent found it difficult to see public interference with policy programs as entirely helpful. It has been argued, e.g., that the National Forums simply adopted a corporate methodology for a public forum instead of creating real deliberative opportunities (Ólafsson 2011). It has also been argued that participants in the National Forums were deceived since they participated in the belief that their input would actually be used for further policy-making (Árnason 2013). Some critics of the Constitutional Council complained that its legitimacy was questionable, since instead of the elected Constitutional Assembly the Constitutional Council had simply been appointed by the parliament (Árnason 2011, p. 350). When it submitted its draft constitution to the parliament as a legislative bill, the reaction among experts and scholars of law and politics was rather negative and during the most intensive discussion of the draft in the fall of 2012 became outright hostile when prominent academics declared that the project must be given “a failing grade” (see, e.g., Arnarson 2012). It was complained that the proposed constitution lacked the terminological precision necessary for such an important document and that some of its articles could even create constitutional uncertainty since they were unclear and internally contradictory (Árnason and Magnússon 2012).

In general, one might say that these projects were evaluated much more harshly within Iceland than abroad where most of them, especially the writing of the new constitution, evoked considerable political and scholarly interest. The appearance of the Best Party before the municipal elections in 2010 was also highly controversial. While the party appealed to voters very broadly and seemed to take voters from all other parties, commentators had mixed and-to a great extent—dismissive reactions to it since the party was considered nonserious and its supporters therefore irresponsible (Boyer 2013, p. 285). The Best Party probably had the best opportunity to make changes within the public administration since it effectively controlled the government of the city of Reykjavík for 4 years, but it can hardly be said that it did so. There was a certain symbolic aspect of Jón Gnarr’s taking over as mayor-a social outcast

turned comedian actually playing the role of a mayor for a whole term-but neither he nor his supporters were able to use that symbolic force for systemic transformation.

It is important to re-evaluate actions, initiatives, and reactions meant to either address an unsatisfactory political situation or create a venue for democratic renewal. One way of doing so is simply to ask whether the quality of discussion and decisionmaking tends to increase with such participatory approaches or not. The criticism sustained by proponents of democratic initiatives has in most cases been focused on the quality of decision-making and on the quality of deliberation. Some critics, such as Vilhjálmur Árnason (a philosopher), have argued that deliberation was seriously flawed at the National Forums, in the Constitutional Council, and in connection with the Icesave referenda (Árnason 2013). Others, such as Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson (political scientist), have argued that in the case of the constitution (at least), the process was badly designed and therefore both the quality and the legitimacy of the project were compromised (Kristinsson 2012). Still others maintain that the products of participatory exercises such as the Constitutional Council are simply fraught with mistakes that seriously compromise their helpfulness (Árnason and Magnússon 2012). Such assessments are based on a very narrow view of how decisions and policymaking should proceed and will tend to treat public engagement as a secondary issue, arguing that it is more important to ensure quality through the involvement of experts.

The Icesave referenda, which twice served to invalidate agreements that the government had reached with British and Dutch authorities, are quite important in such an assessment. The Icesave referenda are a case of a very controversial exploitation of the tool of national referendum. One of the main arguments of those opposed to the referendum was based on the claim that the issue was too complicated for the average voter to understand and that public opinion was “cynically manipulated” (Hallgrímsdóttir and Brunet-Jailly 2016, p. 111). A deeper analysis of the first and second referenda might challenge that assumption on several grounds. Although the referendum was certainly flawed in many respects, nothing suggests that the public’s lack of understanding of the issues was the decisive factor in determining the outcome of the vote. A group of informed people who truly understood what was at stake could have been split along the same lines.

Elections in 2013 seemed to turn the tide back: the two parties that for 12 years before the crisis had controlled government, and were to blame for the policies that left Iceland so vulnerable to an international financial crisis, were reinstated. Events showed however that the Icelandic public could still be mobilized and controversial decisions made by the new government continued to bring people to the streets. In 2014 large crowds protested the government’s decision to formally end membership negotiations with the European Union, which the new government had put on hold, promising a referendum on whether they should be continued (Kjartansdóttir 2015).

The publication of the Panama Papers in 2016 created an even greater outrage as the public discovered not only that 600 Icelanders had over 800 offshore accounts through the company Mossack Fonseca, one of them being the Prime Minister’s wife, whose funds had actually been co-owned with her husband until a new law made it necessary for MPs to declare such assets. Before the law took effect, he

handed his share over to her. The revelations led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and fresh elections (Fontaine 2016).

After the elections in the fall of 2016, parties that had been created after the 2008 crisis and as a response to the crisis held 21 out 63 seats in Iceland’s Parliament. Two of these parties then entered the government with the right-wing Independence Party. Surprisingly the coalition agreement had few elements of the transformative spirit that so strongly characterized the grassroots movements-but this government was short-lived. After one still another round of elections, a coalition was formed with three of the four established Icelandic parties, across the political spectrum with a Left-Green Prime Minister and a Finance Minister from the Conservative Independence Party. This government has made some commitments toward bringing to conclusion some of the reform projects initiated after 2008 including a revision of the Icelandic constitution (Stjórnarráðið 2017). All in all, however, the actual changes brought about through the great social upheavals of the crisis and postcrisis years are relatively modest. It might be argued that greater changes have been achieved with less fanfare in countries that were less radicalized than Iceland was in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Perhaps the Pirate Party reflects some degree of permanent success having brought people from the margins of political activism into parliament for three successive elections. But that has, arguably, also led to some normalization of their platform and even rhetoric. In parliament, however, the party continues to press the government to increase transparency by publishing government data and making the work of the public service and government organizations more open for the public (Burgess and Clark 2016).

I emphasized the moral nature of the public protest action in Iceland in the wake of the 2008 crisis. This character of the protests made many of the demands, arguments, and claims voiced during protest by activist groups, the political groups, and parties that formed around various projects, appealing to the common sense of the average Icelander left deeply frustrated with the lack of accountability displayed by government officials, as well as shellshocked by the days of chaos in October 2008. But it is possible to conclude that the moral outrage somewhat derailed the political goals and objectives that the demand for political renewal needed. Moral outrage eroded the general acquiescent support of the political system-it certainly contributed to a situation where a protest public was formed. But it failed to empower the public to an extent that could break the domination of the political elites. The economy has certainly bounced back, but the moral outrage is still there (Vilhelmsdóttir and Kristinsson 2018).

The conclusion that we can draw from my brief excursion into protest publics that emerged in Iceland in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, especially the Icelandic economic and political collapse, is that public-elite interaction was transformed: the ways in which the public reacts to government action (or inaction) is more forceful and (as examples have shown) more decisive than was previously the case. Furthermore, there is a moral approach to activism which provides common discourse to diverse publics, and there seems to be a strong tendency to translate dissatisfaction with policy performance into democratic dissent (Önnudóttir and Harðarson 2011).

Mobilization can be swift: in a small country, seeing 20%20 \% of the population take to the streets is a powerful reminder of democratic accountability.

I have argued however that the Icelandic case is still no great success in the sense of new practices, approaches, or public engagement. Neither government nor legislature has in any substantive way created deliberative forums for public participation, engagement, or co-creation. The worries expressed by the foreign minister at the citizens’ meeting described above have become a spell which elites seem unable to break. Instead of seeking to channel dissent into deliberative and consultative processes, the problem of numerical representation has prevailed. It follows that even listening to the “crowd” may be seen as an undemocratic approach, since we cannot simply decide to let someone speak for the public (Önnudóttir 2016; Mahony and Clarke 2013, p. 950). This suggests in my view that unless protesting publics, which emerge as a result of a deep political crisis, transform into civic movements with time, capable of working with political elites, they will hardly achieve the necessary political reform through which democratic systems open up for public deliberation and participation that goes right into the policy- and decision-making itself.

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Jón Ólafsson is Professor of Cultural studies and Russian studies at the University of Iceland. His research is mainly in political philosophy and includes deliberative democracy and political epistemology. He has written extensively on the Icelandic constitutional experiment. Jón has also done research on the Communist movement and the history of Soviet Communism. He is the author most recently of Oranges from Abkhazia (Appelsínur frá Abkasíu) which deals with personal fates in the Gulag.