Those of us who were actively working for a sustainable and democratic society in Iceland have always wondered when the window of opportunity opened by the 'pots and pans revolution' would close. Did the last elections bring an end to Iceland's radically democratic moment?
A wave of enthusiasm took Icelanders through the 2012 referendum after the 2008 crash, once the widely-praised 'crowd-sourced' constitution appeared to be within reach. But Icelanders’ hopes seem to be evaporating in the haze of this week-end's parliamentary elections.
The extraordinary bounce-back of the banks reveals the most disturbing, but least obvious, largely invisible, feature of the unfinished European crisis: the transformation of democratic taxation states into post-democratic banking states.
Guilty? Not guilty? The verdict handed down this week by an Icelandic court found former Prime Minister Geir H.Haarde to be both. The verdict seems balanced to some, but extremely unsatisfactory to many.
Never again can the world be told by the custodians of the old that the people cannot be relied upon to write the contract between citizens and government, and write it well.
In the 1990s, Argentina was an IMF poster boy, but it soon became a byword for the failures of the Washington Consensus. Tying its currency to the dollar, cutting public spending and selling its assets led to a deepening debt spiral from which it could not escape, until it defaulted.
