A scholar of the Icelandic Presidency swiftly became a Presidential front-runner.
When I heard that the historian Guðni Jóhannesson was running for President of Iceland—not only running but entering the final weeks of the campaign as the clear favorite—I was intently curious to be present when and if he won. I had met Guðni a year or so earlier, when he delighted a busload of nervous novelists on a literary retreat in Iceland, during an all-day tour of local landmarks that took place on the coldest, windiest, foggiest day an Icelandic April could offer, with the bus neatly enveloped in milk. Guðni, serving as tour guide, mike in hand, kept his cool and his good humor throughout. “Here are the great parliamentary fields of the Thingvellir,” he said at one point, referring to Iceland’s famous early-medieval parliament, and gestured straight-faced toward a wall of white cloud. More impressive, he lightly detailed all the ways in which the myths of the monuments were and were not in accord with the facts of history, providing a detached view of what might be called Icelandic Exceptionalism, while still thinking it exceptional. I liked to tell people in New York that our tour guide was now running for President, though the truth is that he never would have been on the bus had his wife, the Canadian writer Eliza Reid, not been running the literary seminar—but, then, he was on the bus, he did have the mike, and he was giving a guided tour.
I should add that, having married into a Canadian-Icelandic family (about a fifth of Iceland’s population decamped for Manitoba around a century ago, keeping their culture and their national pride intact), I wasn’t entirely unhappy to hear Icelandic exceptionalism debunked, if gently. I had long ago come to accept Icelandic particularities—the cooing voices, the long-winded family histories, the constant coffee consumption—but I’d also had the prideful bits drummed in (world’s oldest democracy, most literate nation, most successful welfare state) for so long that I could stand them being a little upended. Iceland, to be sure, is a country for which many Americans and English and Canadians have an outsized affection, not unlike that which some of the wizards in Tolkien, himself an Icelandic fanatic, have for the Shire. While recognizably part of our own Western world, the country is so islanded, so unlike anyplace we know in landscape and language, that it is possible to feel protective of it in ways that Icelanders themselves sometimes find encumbering.
In thinking about Iceland, one is always whipsawed between two facts. On the one hand, there’s the tiny scale of the place. There are only three hundred thousand-plus people in the country, and a Presidential election, even though it gets a huge, Nordic-style turnout, will still top out at about two hundred and forty thousand voters, about one-third the number in a single congressional district in New York City. One might read that, as a proportion of the population, more Icelanders died in the Second World War than Americans did, which means two hundred and thirty, most of them in seafaring accidents. “Icelanders suffer from ecstatic numerical aphasia” is the way that Heiða Helgadóttir, a prominent alternative politician, put it one morning, over milky coffee, the country’s vin ordinaire. “We are convinced that we come from a country of at least two or three million, and nothing dissuades us.” On the other hand, Iceland is an honest-to-God country, not a principality, like Monaco, or a fragment fallen off a larger one, like Montenegro. It has a language and a history and a culture entirely its own, it fields competitive teams in international football tournaments, and it can claim about as many famous artists—Björk, Sigur Rós—as its far larger Nordic peers.
Politics is serious in Iceland, not least because of its self-image as the Oldest Democracy in the World, a view questioned by only a few academic skeptics—one of them being Guðni Jóhannesson. On the plane to Reykjavík, I finished his “History of Iceland,” the best one-volume study of the country to be written in English. He makes the point that the early parliament was less a democratic conference than a meeting of the tribes and chieftains to sort out their differences—like a meeting of the Five Families to divvy up the Bronx and Brooklyn. Guðni’s history shows that the medieval Iceland of saga was largely a Romantic invention, for the purposes of nineteenth-century nationalism, laid over what had been, until the twentieth century arrived, a scarcity economy of almost unbelievable hardship and hunger. How someone so prepared to look skeptically at his people’s myths would motivate those people to vote for him intrigued me. I was drawn to the Icelandic election, too, for more or less the same reason that Icelanders are drawn to the local swimming pools, where the temperature is kept around that of Icelandic seawater. It seemed refreshing to follow a Presidential campaign where erudition was revered, where the various sides were more or less sane, and where democracy was seen as a communal enterprise, not as a carnival for television. That, at least, was my hope when, arriving in Reykjavík, I raced off to find Guðni in the Höfðatorg, one of the city’s few modern glass-and-steel frame towers, where he was giving a speech.
Reykjavík is perhaps the hippest capital in Northern Europe, a sort of double-sized Williamsburg, with fjords instead of the L train. It is built mostly on a two- and three-story scale, and, as the capital of a timber-depleted island, is made mostly out of the two most unprepossessing of architectural materials: concrete and corrugated steel. But all the concrete has produced a great building, the Hallgrímskirkja church—a masterpiece of Northern Expressionist architecture that looks exactly like Tolkien’s drawing of the tower of Orthanc—while the corrugated steel is jaunty in its waves and ripples, and comically used to create many stylistic effects. One sees corrugated-steel Gothic, and corrugated-steel Queen Anne, and the metal is painted in bright colors that give Reykjavík some of the quality of a child’s playroom, as though it were a city of Lego.
Guðni was, unusually for him, wearing a suit and a blue-and-white flecked tie. I was making a mental note that he looked Presidential when he came up to me and said, “Don’t I look Presidential?” After a quick consultation with Eliza, and with his campaign strategist, a wise and weary-looking professional named Friðjón Friðjónsson, Guðni went upstairs only to find, by the elevator, another candidate for President, one Elísabet Jökulsdóttir. “There are two hundred surrealist moments a day,” Eliza whispered, glancing at her.
Elísabet and Guðni shook hands heartily and exchanged a few warm words. Presumably, she had just been addressing the same group—essentially, Friðjón explained, an I.T. team for a consortium of banks. Guðni slipped into the cafeteria, where the audience had gathered, and began to speak.
Though he spoke in Icelandic, the content of his speech was transparent, the choreography of candidacy in modern democracies being, with the odd exception, universal. A beginning murmur of modest promises; shrugged evasive responses to awkward questions; emphatic responses to sympathetic questions, signalled by forceful gestures; the whole decorated by self-deprecating family humor—in this case, Dad jokes and husband jokes on the Obama model, clearly indicated by bright, sheepish gestures toward the candidate’s spouse. The only English words that appeared were “Manchester United,” but this, too, was transparent in meaning, an obvious answer to a question about Guðni’s favorite team in the Premier League.
The football question was inevitable, Friðjón whispered to me. As it happened, the week of the Presidential election coincided with the most eventful week in modern Icelandic sports. Iceland had advanced in the final tournament of theuefa Euro, and was going to play Austria the following day. Over a quick lunch in the now abandoned cafeteria, candidate and manager addressed the ins and outs of football politics. “What happens to the football games if we play on Saturday and we go into extra time?” Guðni asked. “Will they stop counting?” Friðjón pointed out that if Iceland defeated Austria it would probably play England on Monday, a much better result politically than if it drew and had to play on Saturday, Election Day.
Friðjón had the serene, slightly cynical detachment of any good political strategist, and, after Guðni swept off to his next event, talked about his chances just as a strategist might who was running a Presidential campaign for a promising Midwestern governor in New Hampshire. “We’ve gone everywhere,” he said. “All the little rural places. But our strategy is to turn them all into social media—media for Facebook, for messages, for Twitter.” Anyway, it wasn’t face-to-face electioneering that counted. Guðni’s rise was due entirely to television. He had appeared as an expert commentator at the moment when the Panama Papers revealed that the Prime Minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, had once owned shares in an offshore company belonging to his wife. No one claims that this was illegal, but it was awkward. Guðni had been such a supple and sober guide through the shock—a sort of superior bus-tour guide, come to think of it—that he won over the viewers. Friðjón said that the polls, though descending just a bit, looked good and added calmly, “I’ll be in Paris tomorrow.” It was true: he was going for a day, to see the Iceland-Austria match. (Nearly a tenth of the population was in France to watch the Euros—as though, people said repeatedly, many millions of Americans had travelled with their national team, another instance of ecstatic numerical aphasia.)
At home on the Wednesday morning before the election, Guðni, wearing an Iceland jersey, like every other Icelandic male that day, looked just slightly bemused. (His sons—he and Eliza, who met while studying at Oxford, have four children—were wearing Iceland jerseys, too.) He is tall, with a steady, appealing gaze and the close-cropped hair that Icelandic men favor, and he seemed startled by his own ascent.
Iceland’s constitution makes the role of the President essentially ceremonial, Guðni explained. Yet the country’s double crises—first the banking collapse, in 2008, and then the Panama Papers, this spring—made that role seem inadequate. “After twenty years in office, the current President announced that he wouldn’t seek reëlection,” Guðni said, discussing his improbable candidacy. “At that stage, I was—and I remain—an associate professor of history at the University of Iceland but a frequent commentator on television. So—I remember this vividly—there was class, I was just going to bike home, and I see fourteen missed calls from the media. The message was simple: you need to come up here now, we’re live, and the Prime Minister may resign.” He went on the air with another academic. “We were chatting, we were funny, we were articulate. I’m not saying this to boast”—he inserted instantly, boasting being the cardinal sin of Icelandic culture. “Then the President got involved, because the P.M. resigned, and, with my expertise in the history of the Presidency, I was able to describe to people what options the President had, and, as it happened, this was at a stage when there was nobody sweeping the electorate behind him or her, and the sort of trickle of support I felt to run turned into a flood.” The same kind of distaste for experts and expertise that has been present elsewhere in Europe had developed in Iceland, I had learned, and it worked to Guðni’s advantage. The bank crash had produced a general mistrust of the professional politicians who had let it happen. Guðni might still be an intellectual in good standing, but at least he was not a professional politician with a bad record.
The skeptical positions he had taken in his histories had been used against him—especially his writings on the Cod Wars, with the United Kingdom, in the nineteen-seventies. (Iceland wanted Britain to stop fishing in waters that it claimed were Icelandic, and, after it threatened to withdraw from nato, Britain agreed.) It’s a holy moment in Icelandic history, but Guðni has pointed out that there was much internal dissension on the Icelandic side, and that the “fishing disputes were not wars in the proper sense of the word—had the Royal Navy been allowed to use the weapons at its disposal, the tiny Icelandic coast-guard fleet could have been immobilized in a matter of days.”
“Tell what you said,” Eliza urged.
“Well, early in the campaign there was a televised debate between me and Davið Oddsson, who was focussing on my alleged weaknesses and mistakes, including my work on the Cod Wars and Icelandic history in general.” Oddsson, who had been Prime Minister for a long time, and the governor of the Central Bank of Iceland during the collapse of 2008, was seen as the establishment’s man in the Presidential race.
“So the debate got a bit heated, and I said to him, ‘Sir, have you no decency?’ and that basically clinched it for me,” he recalled. It was the line directed by the Army’s attorney Joseph Welch at Joseph McCarthy, during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Icelanders, being better students of American history than many Americans, generally got the point.
“I have the duty, certainly as a historian, and even more as President, if elected, to tell our story to anyone who wants to listen—objectively, truthfully, because we will only suffer and fool ourselves if we do it any other way,” Guðni said. “We saw this in the years before the banking collapse. We sustained and supported a view of Icelanders as more daring—the descendants of Vikings and voyagers who dared to enter uncharted waters—when in fact they were more daring because they were silly, and better at borrowing money. It had nothing to do with the Vikings, who, if we want to take it further, were murderous bastards, in addition to being voyagers and explorers.”
“And to think that we started as a book group.”
“And to think that we started as a book group.”
Later that day, I crowded, together with what seemed like the entire remaining population of Reykjavík, into Ingólfstorg square to watch the Iceland-Austria match. Icelandic players and their coaches have the same flexible career definitions as the politicians: one coach doubles as a dentist, the goalkeeper as a filmmaker, while the color commentator has a share in the café where I had had breakfast with Heiða. In the posters that lined the square, the star players wore the set, growling stare that is de rigueur for sports-star posters now, with the difference that, since Icelanders, unlike Americans, are not socialized to smile in the first instance, they did not have to be instructed to make those faces. This is how they looked when they werehappy. As Iceland ran, three on one, to the winning goal, the announcer, Guðmundur Benediktsson, was driven to a desperate, orgasmic, inarticulate siren of excitement, now legendary on the Internet, and never to be forgotten by anyone who heard it live. The cheering resounded from one end of the small capital to the other—made louder, perhaps, by all that metal.
Not everyone in Iceland is happy with or impressed by Guðni’s sudden rise—not Oddsson’s supporters, on the right, and not those on the green-tinted left. I heard from a twenty-something friend, after an evening at a Reykjavík bar, that the youth vote—the Berniessons, so to speak—was drifting toward a different candidate, the writer and intellectual Andri Snær Magnason. As it happened, I knew Andri Snær, too, and would have imagined him as a Presidential candidate even less than I might have imagined Guðni. His work, often very funny in a Nordic way, is essentially satiric—one of his sci-fi novels won the Philip K. Dick prize—and his book “Bónus Poetry” involves dry conceptual jokes about consumerism. (Bónus is a sort of Icelandic Walmart.)
Although Andri Snær has a mordant, apocalyptic air, he was a virtuous green. If there were real issues driving Icelandic politics, beyond personalities, they were mostly environmental. The country had made an amazing rebound, post-2008, that was fuelled mainly by the fisheries—the mackerel schools had miraculously come back—and by a huge boom in tourism that the country’s delicate ecology could hardly endure. “Game of Thrones” is shot, in part, in Iceland exactly because the country looks so ancient and timeless; in truth, its geology is extremely young and extremely fragile.
In his house in a Reykjavík suburb—the only place I wasn’t offered coffee; I put it down to perverse principle—Andri Snær could barely suppress a half-smile at what he knew to be the absurdity of a writer with a taste for the absurd playing a political part. Nor was his taste for irony diminished by the fact that he was currently close to second in the polls. He was often on his phone, talking or texting, with his dog, a shy whippet, whisking around his feet; it looked as if his strategist, pollster, and staff consisted of himself and the whippet.
“The Presidency could be a role for a creative,” he said, laughing. He usually wears a sly, excuse-me expression, like the young Woody Allen. “I’ve already been working on a literary-documentary project on global warming. My grandparents went for their honeymoon on Iceland’s largest glacier. At that time, the glacier was moving on a geologic scale. Now the glacier is melting and is moving on a human scale. But our human reactions are on a geologic scale. We are thinking of having a convention in 2025 where we will think of having a convention in 2026 to discuss the outcome of the convention.”
Andri Snær saw no problem with being both Iceland’s leading ironist and its potential leader. It was normal in Iceland for a person to be several things at once, he said. “In Iceland, we try to have a klezmer band, and new jazz, and fusion jazz and techno jazz and classic Chicago jazz,” he said. “We want to have death metal, speed metal, thrash metal. So that means you might be in both a klezmer band and a thrash-metal band. You have to do more things. The guy who is running against me”—he meant Guðni—“has a better-designed campaign. I went out with concepts and agendas pushing things from the edge to the center. He’s playing very polite, and saying, when it comes to environmental issues, that we should take good care when we leave camping areas.” Andri Snær was ginning himself up for televised debates that evening. “I have everything to win, so tonight I might start poking him. Ask him, ‘What do you really think?’ ” He looked fondly at the whippet, as though together they were considering the costs of going negative on Guðni.
Elsewhere, Andri Snær’s campaign might have seemed like pure protest, but Heiða Helgadóttir points out that her own anti-political parody party, the Best Party, won the mayoralty of Reykjavík for a comedian, Jón Gnarr, and then “governed pretty well.” The Pirate Party, with anti-politics of the same kind, is polling extremely well for the parliamentary elections this fall. In a system of proportional representation, parody politics quickly becomes real politics. Of course, parody politics in America quickly becomes real politics, too, but tends to lack the saving self-knowledge of its origins in parody.
I watched the debate that night, with Eliza translating, at Guðni’s campaign headquarters, in a strip mall in Reykjavík, along with a neat semicircle of about twenty Icelandic women. As so often happens, television changed everyone: Andri Snær’s constant ironic half-smile came across as sweetly embarrassed. Davið Oddsson, with swept-back silver-gray hair and a sombre expression, looked, I thought, too censorious, like a Norwegian playwright of the nineteenth century. (Oddsson’s role was, well, odd. On the one hand, his character had been besmirched in the 2008 crash, when he was the governor of the Bank of Iceland. On the other hand, here he was, running for President, very much the confident man of the establishment.) Guðni’s height was even more impressive on TV than in person, although the same steady gaze that made him seem trustworthy now looked slightly over-fixed. The fourth candidate in this debate was Halla Tómasdóttir, a businesswoman in her forties. Guðni had always thought that a woman candidate for President would be the most plausible popular choice, and that, if a woman ran, she would win. Halla had not been the obvious candidate, but here she was now, rising in the polls as one who, though working in the banking sector, had made it through 2008 intact, and had subsequently emphasized the need for a feminist approach to financial matters.
I knew Guðni’s people thought that she was a dark horse surging ahead on the outside, and she was good. Halla was not just sincere-looking for a politician. She was the most sincere-looking human being I have ever seen, a living emoji of sincerity: her head gently tilted to one side, her face a perfect equation of warm smile and worried, caring expression. She explained that she was a simple “plumber’s daughter” now running for President. I felt vaguely uneasy.
Election Day dawned like any good June day in Iceland: overcast and in the forties. Guðni had said that he was going to spend the day relaxing at a football match, and had invited me along. We met for lunch at his headquarters, where cake and coffee had been laid out, with Icelandic zeal. I counted at least twelve kinds of cake and six kinds of cookie, and scarcely a sign of a savory dish. Icelanders feel about eating cake the way New Yorkers feel about not eating cake: it is a sign of their relentless commitment to self-improvement. (The hot coffee, I was assured, kept the cake from being unduly caloric.)
Explaining about the match on the drive to the stadium, Guðni said, “It’s a women’s team I’ve supported since I was a young boy, called Stjarnan, and it’s playing another good women’s team, Valur.” We talked about the Brexit vote, two days earlier. Iceland already has what Britain may want—an affiliation with the single market without actual membership or responsibility—but few here were cheering. Iceland, a fairly closed or anyway homogeneous society, knows that it depends on the openness of others. The most persistent theme of Guðni’s histories is that tiny Iceland, while cultivating a Viking myth of self-reliance, has, like every other country, been tightly wound into a network of dependencies. Christianity came on time, around 1000, just as it came to the rest of the Nordic countries, and then the Reformation, too, arrived on schedule; coffee appeared as the national beverage not long after it did in the rest of Europe. More recently, Iceland benefitted enormously from the Marshall Plan, and from the Cold War-era American Navy and Air Force presence. And though Iceland certainly had eccentric and distinguished possibilities for President, its play of politics was the familiar one, of television and social media and the month’s momentum. Tolkien’s point about the Shire, after all, is not that the small good place can be self-sufficient but that no place ever is. What happens in one place happens everywhere. No island is an island.
“I was probably too soft on Brexit last night,” Guðni said, revisiting the debate. “I said we have to respect the verdict of the people, but there are obviously Brexiteers waking up this morning saying, ‘What have we done?’ There must be a solution, a second referendum, to keep this from happening.” He pointed out that the terms of Iceland’s associate relationship with the E.U. guarantee what many in England seemed to fear, and that is an unrestricted movement of people. “Poles, Portuguese—they can all come here freely,” he said. “If it weren’t for the Poles, the Icelandic fishing industry would break down entirely.”
We arrived at the little stadium. There were about thirty or forty people in the stands. Seagulls wheeled and cawed mournfully overhead. We sat alone with Guðni’s Canadian father-in-law, nothing suggesting that six or seven hours later Guðni might well be elected Iceland’s head of state. I did notice a small girl tugging at her father’s shirt and pointing, and in the second half the two came over for a selfie portrait. It had taken about seventy minutes to break past the politeness barrier. The game was excellent, with the Stjarnan side having an edge, in large part owing to one Donna Key Henry, a Jamaican international who has been playing in Iceland. She was running at slant angles, right through and around the earnest, straightforward Icelandic women, with their blond ponytails and square-to-the-play alignments.
At halftime, Guðni got coffee for us all. “Now, this is relaxing,” he said. “What is better than watching football with hot coffee?” Stjarnan had taken a 3–0 lead. “If Valur scores a goal, that would make for a more interesting, highly competitive match,” he said, laughing. “But today of all days I think we don’t want an interesting, highly competitive match.” It was the day before his birthday, he reminded me, and, win or lose, he was going to celebrate it by flying to Nice with Eliza for the next Euro game, against England, of all places, on Monday. He didn’t know then, but didn’t seem as though he would be surprised to discover, that Iceland could defeat England—as, of course, it did, by a come-from-behind score of 2–1, in one of the most astounding upsets in the history of European team sports.
But I knew that Guðni would not have thought it had happened by chance. The Icelandic association had devoted absurd resources to developing young players on indoor pitches; the coaches had to have a hundred-plus-hour training course to be certified. The best Icelandic players had got even better playing abroad. Guðni had been quoted often during the campaign as saying—a thought he repeated while we watched the game—that the men’s team was good because it knew what it was good at being good at: defense and counterattack. I also understood that his allegiance to the semi-professional women’s team of Stjarnan, which was real and weekly, was in support of the idea that a culture, even a sporting one, had to run all the way to the ground to rise up in the air.
That night, in the ballroom of the Reykjavík Grand Hotel, equipped with a television podium and giant screens, there were some nail-biting moments. The first results, coming in from the countryside, showed Guðni and Halla neck and neck. Sveinn, Guðni’s social-media man, and a blond Icelandic actress were up onstage, cheerleading the expected celebration, but now their smiles tightened sharply. The sound was turned up as the results came in. I realized that I was tense myself, though the numbers being reported for each region were much smaller than those in the congressional district I vote in every two years, where I am hard-pressed to name my congresswoman. I was, I realized, suffering from ecstatic numeric aphasia.
Then the first Reykjavík result came in, and I saw Sveinn release a sigh and double-clutch his fists. “It’s in the bag,” he told me. “We were worried that Andri Snær might have more votes in the city—the hipster, artist, Reykjavík, microbrew vote—but we have it in the bag.” I saw Friðjón, back from France. “Closer than I would have liked,” he said professionally. “But a win is a win.”
I have always wanted to be the first to say to someone “Congratulations, Mr. President.” And so I waited for Guðni to come to the ballroom. He arrived at last, buffeted by cameras, and made a speech, with Eliza, in a blue First Lady’s dress, by his side. He was obviously promising to be the President of all Icelanders, the last step in the choreography of candidacy. A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang “Happy Birthday,” in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: “Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ” The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible. ♦
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.
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