Current Events Watch

Iceland: Storming the Althingi

On 20 January 2009, parliament in Iceland resumed after the holidays.  But no business as usual for the Icelandic politicians any more.  People began to besiege the parliament building, demanding early elections and not taking “No” for an answer.  Writing for the Guardian today, Eirikur Bergmann described the political atmosphere in Iceland thus: “While Barack Obama was being sworn in to office on Capitol Hill yesterday, the people of Iceland were starting the first revolution in the history of the republic.  The word ‘revolution’ might sound a bit of an overstatement, but given the calm temperament that usually prevails in Icelandic politics, the unfolding events represent, at the very least, a revolution in political activism.”  The siege of the parliament is still continuing today.

For 15 weeks the Icelandic nation has protested peacefully every Saturday. They have been protesting the incompetence of the ministers, the incompetence of the head of the Central Bank. They have been protesting because a cabal of 30 capitalists have ruined their economy. Today, they were not content with protesting where we could easily be ignored. 3000 came with pots and pans and voices; and made such a racket that parliament had to stop.

On the 29th of September the government of Iceland declared that it would nationalize one of the big three Icelandic banks. This started a chain reaction of runs on the other banks and political screwups that we still haven’t seen the end of and resulted in a complete meltdown of the Icelandic economy, affecting millions of people in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.