Abstract
Though nationalism has always been strong in Iceland, populist political parties did not emerge as a viable force until after the financial crisis of 2008. On wave of the crisis a completely renewed leadership took over the country’s old agrarian party, the Progressive Party (PP), which was rapidly transformed in a more populist direction. Still the PP is perhaps more firmly nationalist than populist. However, when analyzing communicational changes of the new postcrisis leadership it is unavoidable to categorize the party amongst at least the softer version of European populist parties, perhaps closest to the Norwegian Progress Party.
Highlights
The Icelandic government’s decision to propose a withdrawal of the country’s application for membership of the European Union was announced only shortly after the long-expected publication of a report commissioned by the government and written by the Institute for Economic Studies at the University of Iceland
The government believes to have found sufficient evidence in the report to withdraw the membership application (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2014), the proposal to withdraw the application has been met with massive protest in the Icelandic public sphere, primarily due to the fact that key figures in both of the coalition parties had repeatedly announced in their elections campaigns for the general elections in 2013 that the decision whether or not to continue the EU membership bid would be subjected to a referendum, to be held during the upcoming legislative period
It can be said with certainty that this element of incrementalism has characterized the progress of European integration throughout its history, and the same is reflected in the institutional changes brought about by the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty
Summary
Institutional and political aspects are of key importance in the decision to withdraw the membership application, whether such aspects have received sufficient attention in the public reception of the Institute’s report can be questioned The debate on these points still suffers from profound weaknesses regarding not primarily the status of democracy in the European Union as such (in particular in the EU’s post-Lisbon institutional architecture), but more importantly regarding the question of what kind of democracy and democratic accountability is possible in the EU in the first place, given (a) the union’s unique character as a transnational polity sui generis and (b) the heavy reliance of assessments of democratic performance on concepts developed for a state-centered democratic theory (e.g. Cheneval & Schimmelfennig 2013; Bohman 2007a, 2007b; Eriksen & Fossum, 2012).
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