A Joke is a Very Serious Thing

By: Andrea Lloyd

(Editor’s Note: this article was recently posted by my friend and colleague, Andrea Lloyd, on the Sauder School of Business’s ISIS website.Given our use of the BEST Party’s amazing campaign video on Saturday, we thought it only fitting to expand the digital story with a written one. Andrea, thanks for being a fantastic Guest Correspondent!).

I recently returned from a two-week photography holiday in Iceland. In addition to enjoying its spectacular, raw landscapes – lava fields, waterfalls, and eerie plumes of geothermal steam – I caught a glimpse of the fascinating political and economic landscape of post-crash Iceland. Prior to my departure a CBC radio news story had already piqued my curiosity. It described the sensational political ascent of a newly-formed “joke” party, the “Best Party”, to victory in Reykjavik’s recent city elections on May 29^th, 2010. I wondered whether Canada should or could experience a similar shake up?

But first, some context on Iceland’s economic implosion in 2008. According to Reykjavik’s hip English language newspaper, “The Grapevine”, Iceland rode a wave of “Viking Capitalism” – a brand of high risk banking whose instrument was called “IceSave” – that propelled Iceland to the world’s attention as the ‘poster child’ of the 2008 global financial crisis. In October 2008, the then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown used anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Iceland’s assets, effectively transforming it into a ‘rogue’ state within Europe and triggering, some say, a wider collapse. Iceland’s banks failed, leaving the nation bankrupt and its taxpayers on the hook for a staggering $5 billion to UK and Netherlands depositors.

In a March 2010 referendum, following the “sauce pan revolution” of the previous winter, Iceland’s Foreign Ministry announced that voters overwhelmingly rejected a deal to pay back the money to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, citing “widespread frustration over the claim on ordinary citizens in Iceland to pay the price for the irresponsible behavior of reckless bankers”. (Of course, why Iceland is “allowed” to do this, when other countries are not, is a deeper question that is beyond the scope of this post).

Enter the Best Party. After the dark days of the collapse, Jon Gnarr, a cheeky comedian and former anarcho-punk musician who toured with Bjork’s band the Sugarcubes, sensed “the need for a breath of fresh air, a new interaction”. In just six months, he gathered together many prominent members of Reykjavik’s cultural and creative community to form the Best Party (in Icelandic – Besti flokkurinn), and won the mayoral race, scoring 34.7% of the vote, securing 6 of 15 seats of the city council with 83% of registered voter turn-out.

The Best Party’s surprise victory was aided in large part by its unorthodox campaign video that featured Best Party members singing the “best manifesto” to Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best”. (To understand more about what the Best Party represents, this Youtube video is a must see). Jon Gnarr is now the fourth mayor in four years in Iceland’s energetic capital, of which the greater Reykjavik area is home to nearly two-thirds of Iceland’s population.

The upstart “Besties” threw Iceland’s established parties and political scientists in a tizzy. As Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland, said:  “People know Jon Gnarr is a good comedian, but they don’t know anything about his politics. And even as a comedian, you never know if he’s serious or if he’s joking.” Accordingly, new Mayor Jon Gnarr reassured his constituents: “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” he said, “because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”

The story of the Best Party has captured my imagination.  Through chats over coffee and “Viking” lager with various Reykjavik locals, my conclusion (definitely not verified by stringent research methods) is that this “protest” vote is something more than a cynical throw-away vote, as some political scientists have described it; rather, it represents an optimistic affirmation of the future. As my Icelandic friend Erla Petursdottir, a Reykjavik lawyer, observed, the Best Party’s surprise victory served to “remind people what is important”.

In Canada, political pundits and pollsters have recently decried the moribund participation in federal (and other) elections, and rising cynicism towards electoral politics. Maybe we could use a breath of Iceland’s fresh air here? I like John Gnarr’s assessment: “Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious”.