Excerpted from a report by
Alexandra Topping:

“Jón Gnarr, the city mayor, is not a typical politician.

The self-described anarchic clown came to power after Iceland’s financial crash, promising nothing but to break his promises and procure a polar bear for the local zoo.

But three years later, his zeal for direct – and digital – democracy is exciting reformers, who are looking to Iceland for a glimpse of how democracy might work for the Facebook generation.

With two-thirds of its 320,000 population on Facebook, Iceland can be a petri dish for democratic ideas, according to the mayor.

“What we have here is a very small community, but there are so many ideas that can be tried out to see if they work, which can then be adopted in a bigger place,” Gnarr said, during an interview in which he touched on anarchy, hallucinations and the tedium of Linguaphone conversations as well as democratic reform. “Reykjavík and Iceland are perfect places to experiment with democracy.”

The experiment will continue shortly when a politically engaged electorate takes to the polls for the first time since forcing its government to step down in 2009, following the implosion of Iceland’s banking sector.

So many new parties have been formed that a law was passed to change the format of the ballot paper, while in the background the future of the country’s constitution – widely proclaimed as the first crowd-sourced constitution in history – hangs by a thread.

After the crash, like many in the country, Gnarr was frustrated with conventional politics, but instead of “saying something sarcastic on Facebook”, he formed the modestly named Best party. “I don’t know if I believe in democracy, but in my opinion it’s better than tyranny,” he said.

“And if we want to maintain it, it is so important to find ways for people to participate. The reason we are in this mess is because people were careless and nonchalant about democracy.”

Since gaining power, Best party has worked with non-profit democracy reformers The Citizens Foundation to create Better Reykjavík, an award-winning platform that allows users to debate and suggest policies, “like” policy ideas, make budget decisions and vote on micro-issues affecting their neighbourhood. If a policy – those mooted by members of the municipal government or Reykjavík residents have equal weight – is “liked” enough times, it works its way to the top of the priorities list and action is taken.

A new national party, Bright Future – a sister party to Best party, or the new-wave successors to Best party’s punk, as Gnarr puts it – uses similar methods to create policy, and is running at about 10% in the polls. The Pirate party – which puts the internet at the heart of its policymaking – is on 7.8%.

The parties are small, but some of their ideas are gaining traction. “People are discussing politics 24/7 online, but nobody turns up to meetings,” said Bright Future leader Gudmundur Steingrímsson, who called it an attempt to create an online party for the 21st century.

He described the party’s homepage as a Facebook environment, with public debate around policy open to everyone. “It’s a very open realm, the only rule is that you have to be polite,” he said.

“People believe, quite rightfully, that politics is boring, and there is an incentive for politicians to keep politics boring so people don’t question what they are doing. We want to open it up – not to say it’s constantly fun, but show that politics does have a purpose.”

A combination of extraordinary circumstance and mass internet penetration has created a fertile environment for democratic reform in Iceland, said Dr Andy Williamson, a digital democracy consultant.

“It is definitely a country reformers should be watching,” he said. “Other countries could learn that you can create a shared conversation, and trust people to input into the national process.”

But the stalling of Iceland’s constitution revealed the challenges of digital reform, he added. “What Iceland shows us is that the internet can be an instrument for change, but it cannot break existing power structures.”

If Iceland demonstrates the possibilities of direct democracy, recent months have also exposed its limitations. A row still rages over the country’s constitution, which was created after its economic collapse. When 950 Icelanders, randomly chosen from the national register, gathered for one day in 2010 to decide its founding principles it was hailed as the world’s first “crowd-sourced” constitution.

A 25-member constitutional council drew up the constitution in four months – despite Iceland’s supreme court judging the election of the council void.

The draft was not without controversy: it stipulated that Iceland’s remaining unprivatised natural resources should remain in the hands of the state, a move unlikely to be supported by Iceland’s powerful fishing industry, and called for freedom of information and greater accountability for politicians.

Despite the fact that two-thirds of voters approved the document in a non-binding referendum in October 2012, the bill did not make it through parliament before it broke for elections, and several politicians told the Guardian it was unlikely to proceed in its current form.

Bjarni Benediktsson, chairman of the Independence party that held power at the time of Iceland’s economic crash, said the constitution had been rushed and created without experts.

“I have to admit I think people went way ahead of themselves here,” he said. “You can call me conservative, but that’s what I am and I think we should be conservative when it comes to the foundation of the entire legal system in Iceland.”

Now campaigners fear for the constitution’s life. Any change to it must be approved by two successive parliaments, but outgoing prime minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir passed an amendment on her final day which means the constitution could be approved if it gains the support of two-thirds of parliament and 40% of the electorate in a further referendum. It is, campaigners say, a mammoth task.

“If the bill is killed, as many in parliament seem to hope – if the window of opportunity that opened up after the crash is closed – then it will open a wound deeper than any in history since Iceland joined Nato in 1949,” said Thorvaldur Gylfason, professor of economics at the University of Iceland and a member of the constitutional committee.

“We want the world to know about this,” he said. “A parliament ignores the will of its people at its peril.”

But whatever the fate of the constitution, the mayor of Reykjavík is confident that the march of direct democracy in Iceland will not easily be halted. “Best party is like the first little mammal in the land of the dinosaurs,” he said.”