Iceland’s Elections: May The ‘Best’ Party Win

No, this is not a satirical article drawn from The Onion:

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — A polar-bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jón Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it? In the depressed aftermath of the country’s financial collapse, the Best Party emerged in May as the biggest winner in Reykjavik’s elections, with 34.7 percent of the vote, and Gnarr — who also promised a classroom of kindergartners he would build a Disneyland at the airport — is the fourth mayor in four years of a city that is home to more than one-third of the island’s 320,000 people.

In his acceptance speech he tried to calm the fears of the other 65.3 percent.

“No one has to be afraid of the Best Party, because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that,” he said.

His party won six of the City Council’s 15 seats, and Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but he ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of “The Wire.”

The Best Party’s members include a who’s who of Iceland’s punk-rock scene. The new government granted free admission to swimming pools for everyone younger than 18.

“Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious,” said Gnarr, whose foreign-relations experience includes a radio show in which he regularly crank-called the White House, the CIA, the FBI and police stations in the Bronx, N.Y., to see if they had found his wallet.

The polar-bear idea, for example, was not totally facetious. As a result of climate change, a few polar bears have swum to Iceland in recent years and been shot. Better, Gnarr said, to capture them and put them in the zoo.

The free towels? That evolved from an idea to attract more tourists by attaining spa status for the city’s public pools, which have seawater and sulfur baths. For accreditation under certain European Union rules, however, a spa has to offer free towels, so that became a campaign slogan.

Gnarr, born in Reykjavik as Jón Gunnar Kristinsson to a policeman and a kitchen worker, was not a model child. At 11, he decided school was useless to his future as a circus clown or pirate and refused to learn anymore. At 14, he was sent to a boarding school for troubled teenagers and stayed until he was 16, when he left school for good.

Last winter, he opened a Best Party website and started writing surreal “political” articles.

Party anthem

The campaign released a popular video set to Tina Turner’s “The Best,” in which Gnarr posed with a stuffed polar bear and petted a rock, while joining his supporters in singing about the Best Party.

“A lot of us are singers,” said Óttarr Proppé, the third-ranking member of the Best Party, who was with the cult rock band HAM and the punk band Rass.

Proppé now sits on the city’s executive board, where he will be deciding matters such as how much money to allocate for roads.