Winston Churchill once said “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” This was Churchill’s way of conceding that democracy is by no means perfect.
It is a flawed form of government that is nonetheless as much a part of the fabric of our national culture as the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Sure, our form of government has its issues, but the result of the recent mayoral election in Reykjavík, Iceland, is an unlikely example of democracy’s true power.
The election in June yielded a surprise result: the new mayor of Reykjavík, Iceland’s capital and largest city, is a comedian whose campaign promises include a pledge to a kindergarten class to build a Disneyland at the airport and free towels at public pools. The Best Party, which won the most council seats in the election, is composed mostly of members of Iceland’s punk-rock scene and led by comedian Jon Gnarr, who ran his campaign as a joke to satirize Iceland’s political system.
He has never been shy about the absurdity of his campaign and his candidacy, telling the Financial Times upon his victory “Our whole campaign was based on a lot of nonsense. Our slogans, like ‘All Kinds of Everything,’ were nonsense.
But I am happy to be elected.” In one of his first decisions after the election, Gnarr needed to form a coalition with one of the other parties to gain a majority. He nixed any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of “The Wire” and eventually partnerned with the center-left Social Democrats, even though he thought they had merely hired someone to watch the show and report back. In his acceptance speech, he reassured voters who voted for a different party, saying “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party.”
Some might say that this is an example of democracy failing. Is it good for any government to put someone in charge whose chief credentials include crank calls to the CIA and a starring television role as a comical, middle-age Marxist? Many will dismiss Gnarr right away as a shallow entertainer who is in over his head.
On the contrary, Iceland’s election is a case in which the system worked, and the people of Reykjavík formed the shape of their government, the same power America’s Founding Fathers envisioned for our country’s citizens. The city’s residents were tired of scandals and poor decisions by the established politicians in their government, especially surrounding Iceland’s banking collapse, so they voted for a new direction. “It’s a protest vote,” Professor Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson of the University of Iceland told the New York Times. In fact, Gnarr does have serious plans for the city, such as using Reykjavík’s geothermal energy to make it a center for electric cars. Whether the choice proves to be a good one, the people of Reykjavík got what they wanted.
There have been results similar to the election of Gnarr in our own political system. Jesse Ventura, a professional wrestler, became governor of Minnesota in 1999, and the current governor of California originally made his name as a robot assassin from the future. But neither of these candidates was as far outside the box as Gnarr, and both Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger still made an effort to conform to the accepted notions of a candidate and a campaign. Gnarr’s election is a warning to other elected officials about what can happen when the voters are unhappy, and it is also an inspiration to potential politicians. It proves that you do not have to go to the best schools or know all the right people to be able to run for office and make a difference. In Reykjavík, a group of Icelandic punk rockers and a comedian proved that in democracy, the people still hold the most power.