Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Frank Augstein/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Ashish Ghadiali: What is happening in Iceland right now? It’s really weird, right? You’ve got a prosperous nation, the economy has recovered out of a terrible collapse, and suddenly, led by the Pirate Party, you've got this most radical reformist government within an inch of power…
Birgitta Jónsdóttir: So, Icelanders are 333,000, and this means that you reach critical mass about things much quicker. Truth and lies become the norm much quicker. Xenophobia or tolerance become the norm much quicker in small communities. Anyone that's lived in a village knows what I'm talking about. So in the wake of the collapse, Icelanders realised that everything they had put their trust in had failed them. Not just politicians. Also media and academia and so forth, and there was this sort of tremendous shock, anger, grief.
Then we went into the austerity that you would do in an IMF programme. We were the first prosperous country to go into that programme for a long time. And that meant that the left-wing government that was elected to clean up the mess was under tremendous pressure and they did lots of things right, but they did a lot of things wrong, because they basically wanted to do everything. So people started to distrust them as well. Then Icelanders decided to vote again for the parties that were responsible for the mess. And we were lucky enough to get all the tourists and new fish that made us prosper in spite of the fact that we were coming out of a very heavy collapse.
