Constitution on Ice

Drawing on various materials that have not been presented in English before, this chapter reviews the making of Iceland’s post-crash, partly crowd-sourced constitution bill and the unprecedented attempt by Parliament subsequently to kill the bill. Following a brief historical introduction,1 the chapter describes step by step how the bill was prepared and then put together, how it was received, and how and why Parliament is trying to prevent the bill from being adopted. The chapter addresses various criticisms leveled against the bill along the way. It needs to be emphasized up front that these criticisms, whether well founded or not, are irrelevant because Parliament held a national referendum on 20 October 2012 in which the bill and its key individual provisions were accepted by an overwhelming majority of the voters. A democratic nation cannot under any circumstances permit the outcome of national elections, let alone a constitutional referendum, to be fixed ex post, but this is what Parliament is at present trying to do in an open affront to democracy. Historical Background A key promise given by the post-crash government in early 2009 concerned the constitution which, drawn up in haste at the time of Iceland’s full separation from Denmark in 1944, Parliament had promised to revise ever since without being able or willing to keep its promise, partly because it was not impelled by crisis to do so.2 In his New Year’s address to the nation in 1949, Iceland’s first president, Sveinn Björnsson (1949), reminded the politica