Tuesday, July 12, 2016
The Icelandic Pirate Party and the Search
for a New Democracy
An internet-powered movement that puts citizens ahead of
ideology could win a parliamentary plurality this fall.
Although the Pirate Party has made a bigger splash in other
European countries, like Germany, with its demands for copyright reform, it is
in Iceland with a sweeping platform of political reform that it could achieve
its biggest electoral success this fall. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)
Inside a modernist warehouse alongside the ocean in Reykjavík,
Iceland’s capital city, four men sit around a table discussing the country’s
drug policies. A skull-and-crossbones flag adorns the wall and a cheap blow-up
sword hangs over one door frame. Though they aren’t wearing eyepatches or
hunting for treasure, these Icelanders call themselves Pirates, and they are
drafting policy for a new, insurgent political party, the Pirate Party.
Started as a Swedish movement in 2006, the Pirate Party
advocated for copyright reform and freedom of access to information. It
championed whistleblowers and defended WikiLeaks. After expanding its platform to
include civil liberties and direct democracy, the party grew: it now boasts
chapters in approximately 60 countries.
Although the Pirate movement only spread to Iceland in 2012, the Icelandic
Pirate Party is the most successful branch: it was the first to gain
representatives in a national parliament. In 2013, with 5.1 percent of the
vote, the Pirates took three seats in Iceland’s legislature. And despite its
small numbers in parliament, the party spearheadeda repeal of Iceland’s 1940 blasphemy law —
a substantial victory for free-speech advocates.
Over the past year, the Pirates have steadily risen in the
polls, regularly netting one-third of the support — a significant plurality in
a country with six political parties represented in the parliament. If their
support holds, the Pirates could push the center-right coalition out of office
in the fall elections.
“The Pirate Party is successful because we have actually proven
ourselves to be human,” says Ásta Helgadóttir, 26, one of the Pirate Party’s
representatives in parliament. “We are not trying to be politicians.”
Iceland’s Pirates are not alone. Disaffected citizens on both
sides of the Atlantic and both sides of the ideological divide — from the Tea
Partiers to the Feel-the-Berners, from the Leavers of Britain to Spain’s
Podemos and Nuit Debout in France — have promoted insurgent campaigns,
attempting to reinvigorate democracy and bring representation into the 21st
century.
The manner in which these political movements choose to build
trust, says Helgadóttir, is critical.
“You can [build trust] with authority, with ultra-nationalism,
the way that Poland and Turkey are going right now,” she says. “You tell
people, ‘I have control, everything is going very well. So you should trust
me.’” Or, she continues, you provide “a democratic alternative.”
By utilizing the internet to crowdsource policy, the Pirates
have chosen the latter path: members can submit proposals for a partywide vote.
Such open-ended collaboration has even allowed for ideological diversity within
the party, eschewing the traditional left-right divide.
“Almost everyone [in the Party] believes different things than
me,” says Ólafur Torfi Yngvason, who attended his first Pirate meeting in July.
“That’s the whole point of the Pirate Party. They’re not trying to be anywhere
on the political axis; they’re a collection of people.”
The notion that a party could transcend political infighting has
captured the attention of many Icelanders, who have an understandable distrust
of the political establishment. In 2008, Iceland’s banks — which had ballooned
under reckless speculation, foreign-currency borrowing, and absent regulations
— collapsed, leaving the economy in shambles. Public confidence in the political system plummeted.
Suddenly, corruption was real and prevalent.
Then, in April, the Panama Papers implicated Prime Minister
Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson for funneling personal finances into offshore
accounts. Gunnlaugsson failed to disclose such expenditures to parliament, an
illegal act under Icelandic law.
Icelanders took to the streets in the nation’s largest-ever
protests and forced Gunnlaugsson to resign, though his Progressive Party stayed
in power. Following the scandal, the Pirates were polling as high as 43 percent, whereas the
Progressives found themselves at 6.5 percent.
The leftist parties were always a part of the game.
— Ásta Helgadóttir
Interestingly, the traditional center-left parties have not
benefited from the decline of the conservative government. Yngvason says that’s
because Iceland’s leftist parties proved to be incompetent during the four
years they held power after Iceland’s 2008 financial crash — the only period a
left-wing majority controlled parliament during Iceland’s 72 years of
independence.
The Social Democrats and Left-Green governing coalition
proceeded to lose the 2013 elections to the still-maligned conservative parties
after failing to pass meaningful reform during their time in office, and
alienating Icelanders bykowtowing to the IMF’s bailout demands.
“The leftist parties were always a part of the game,”
Helgadóttir, the young Pirate MP, charges.
The Pirates believe that democratic systems based on
centuries-old power structures are increasingly unable to meet the demands of
today’s generation.
Iceland’s democratic structures were inherited from the Danish
monarchy, Helgadóttir notes. “We still have the same power structures that we
had in the 17th century,” she says. “[Our government] was not built on
democracy; it was built on the idea of an authoritarian king.”
For Iceland’s Pirates, updating democracy means expanding
transparency and giving citizens a greater foothold in policymaking, allowing
them to take power back from the political class.
Whether other countries choose to follow in Iceland’s footsteps
is still an open question.
The US had a revolution to free itself of a monarchy, but now
appears to be tilting towards oligarchy. With the expanded role of big money in
politics, American political parties have seen their influence wane and voter
alienation rise. Could the Democrats and Republicans get their mojo back by
becoming more open and attentive to public input — a change that by definition
would mean becoming less attentive to monied special
interests?
At minimum, for the US, where voter participation is generally
low (a situation exacerbated by recent laws that limit voting rights in some
states), it’s worth considering the Iceland Pirates’ view about what a more
representative democracy entails.
“Democracy is much more than voting,” says Helgadóttir. “It’s a
means of thinking, a tool. It’s a utopian goal: there’s no such thing as a
perfect democracy. It’s something we have to build upon.”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 4.0 License
Adam Eichen is a member of the Democracy Matters
Board of Directors and a Maguire Fellow at the French research institute Sciences Po, doing research on comparative campaign
finance policy. He is also a Democracy Fellow at the Small Planet
Institute, where he is working on a book on democracy with founder
Frances Moore Lappé. He served as the deputy communications director for Democracy
Spring. Follow him on Twitter: @eichendoit.
Gabriel Dunsmith is a graduate of Vassar
College. He studied in Iceland in 2014 and now lives in Washington, DC. Follow
him on Twitter: @GabeDnsmith.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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