Populist wave lifts Iceland’s Pirate Party

October 30, 2016 11:17 pm | Updated December 02, 2016 12:39 pm IST - REYKJAVIK

EN ROUTE TO VICTORY? Birgitta Jonsdottir of the Pirate Party (left) after parliamentary elections on Saturday.

EN ROUTE TO VICTORY? Birgitta Jonsdottir of the Pirate Party (left) after parliamentary elections on Saturday.

Spain has Podemos. Italy has its Five Star Movement, and Greece its Syriza. Now, the populist insurgency sweeping through Europe is finding a foothold in Iceland, where the Pirate Party, with its pirate flag logo and anarchist leanings, was poised to make big gains in a general election Saturday.

Iceland is one of the most prosperous, equitable and accountable democracies in the world, and has recovered strongly from the 2008 financial crisis. Even so, the nation’s political elite has been far from immune to public anger. Many voters are willing to risk it all by choosing the Pirate Party, which has spectacularly captured a chunk of the Icelandic electorate despite its niche origins as a hacktivist group.

“When I think about politics in Iceland, it makes me want to vomit,” Sigmundur Knutsson, 62, said in a deli as he ate fermented shark, an Icelandic delicacy. “It’s all about corruption among a very small elite,” he said. “There is something that is not right. Something smells bad.”

The Pirate Party, best known for its activism over copyright law and the protection of civil liberties, was expected to gain significantly in Saturday’s election. It is riding on a wave of anti-establishment fervor spreading across Europe and the U.S., upending traditional politics and fracturing mainstream parties.

For the first time in Iceland’s long political history — its Parliament was founded in 930 — a dozen parties are jostling for power over this frozen volcanic landmass. Iceland, which is the size of Kentucky, has an electorate of about 260,000, barely enough people to fill three football stadiums.

Since its formation four years ago, the Pirate Party has gained three seats in the 63-seat Parliament. At its peak of popularity in April, when public outrage had erupted over millions of financial documents leaked from a boutique Panamanian law firm, the party commanded the support of 40 percent of the electorate, according to opinion polls. The documents, known as the Panama Papers, revealed the vast hidden wealth of politicians, including Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who stepped down over accusations of a conflict of interest.

Although support for the Pirates has since fallen by half, opinion polls conducted by Gallup in the run-up to the election showed that they remained the second most popular group after the mainstream, center-right Independence Party, which was in power when Iceland’s economy collapsed in 2008.

The Pirate Party is unlikely to win an outright majority but could still gain enough seats to form part of a coalition in the horse-trading that is likely to follow the election.

About 40 percent of Pirate supporters are under 30, and they are pinning their hopes on a party that has promised to install a more inclusive, transparent government.

The Pirates have pledged to enhance direct democracy by passing the world’s first “crowd-sourced constitution,” drafted by Icelandic civilians rather than politicians. Parliament blocked the document in 2013.

The party also wants to redistribute wealth and increase the government’s anti-corruption powers. (The country is the 13th least corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International, a watchdog group, ahead of the U.S.)

“We want to see trickle-down ethics rather than make-believe trickle-down economics,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, 49, the leader of the Pirate Party and a former WikiLeaks activist, said in an interview Friday.

Sporting sharp black bangs that sliced across her pale brow, Jonsdottir wore a black dress and black Doc Martens embroidered with red roses, fitting her self-description as an anarchist “poetician.” (At age 14, she published her first poem, “Black Roses,” about a nuclear holocaust.)

“We need to reboot politics,” she said in her parliamentary office, next to a strip club on a narrow street. She worked on a laptop covered with a sticker that read: “National Security Agency Monitored Device.”

Her party has granted citizenship to Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s reach into the lives of millions of Americans.

In Iceland, a nation where internet penetration is among the highest in the world but social media is still a relatively new political tool, a strategist who once worked to help try to elect Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-N.H., president of the United States, is now helping push the Pirate Party’s message through Facebook and Twitter.

Winnie Wong, who created the viral political hashtag #FeelTheBern, spent a few months training the Pirates’ tiny media team on how to create viral content, and working with party leaders to improve their media presence. (She said her Icelandic was not good enough to create a Nordic equivalent of the Sanders campaign’s famous hashtag.)

“They needed a bit of structure, and we gave them an intensive training on the mechanisms of what it takes to stage a successful insurgent campaign,” Wong said in a coffee shop near Hallgrimskirkja, a silvery Lutheran church shaped like a gigantic rocket ship.

Soon, videos the party posted on Facebook gathered on average 26,000 views each, she said, equivalent to about 10 percent of Iceland’s voting population.

“We really want them to win,” she said, partly so that the next generation of U.S. lawmakers can draw inspiration from Iceland for a better type of government.

Opponents criticize the Pirate Party as political lightweights with little experience governing. The party focuses on more abstract, esoteric issues like the crowd-sourced constitution, critics say, when most voters are interested in more pressing topics like rising housing prices, student debt, pensions and the effects of climate change.

Still, those critics, like Birgir Armannsson, a member of the Independence Party, recognize that the political class shares part of the blame for such strong anti-establishment feeling. His party has been in power since 2013, and it was in the governing coalition in the run-up to the 2008 crisis.

“People lost confidence in traditional politics, institutions, society,” he said in an interview. “People are still shocked. It’s kind of like post-traumatic stress.”

In 2008, Iceland’s economy collapsed after its banking sector, fresh from deregulation, grew exponentially. In the years before that, Icelanders binged on credit, some becoming billionaires overnight. By 2006, the average Icelander was 300 percent wealthier than three years earlier. Cronyism became rampant.

When the crisis hit, Icelanders were plunged into debt and banks racked up losses of $100 billion, which amounted to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman and child, according to Michael Lewis, the author of “The Big Short.”

Since then, Iceland has rebuilt its economy, thanks in part to booming tourism, becoming something of a model of recovery for crisis-hit countries.

The investment units of banks have all but disappeared. Former financiers have moved on to new careers in the information technology or gaming sectors, or have gone back to fishing, the country’s traditional source of wealth. Iceland has sentenced at least 29 senior bankers to prison for their involvement in the crisis. (By contrast, only one executive in the U.S. has gone to prison. Though major banks associated with the meltdown have paid billions of dollars for their role in the crisis, none of their top executives was held personally accountable.)

“The economy has been recovering,” Armannsson said, adding that Iceland has low unemployment, low inflation, low inequality and healthy growth.

“You could say we are well off and our outlook is quite good,” he said. “But part of the population is still not satisfied.”

Despite efforts to remedy mistakes and improve governance, “we are still in a political storm in the aftermath of the financial crisis,” Armannsson said, sounding genuinely puzzled.

“This is a little bit extraordinary.” — New York Times News Service

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