Iceland’s parliament, the Althing, was the world’s first. Today, some 1,086 years later, this small island nation that also gave the world its first openly gay female head of state is again leading the way. In 2013, five months after its founding, the Pirate Party won three of Iceland’s 63 parliamentary seats – the only one of the world’s thirty or so officially registered Pirate Parties with a presence in a national legislature – and it is expected to gain between 15 and 20 in the elections later this year. It has been quite a rise for an activist movement that initially focused on internet freedom and copyright reform.
One of its emerging stars, Thórhildur Sunna Aevarsdóttir, sweeps into the part-cafeteria, part-library area of the Kex Hostel in Reykjavík, shaking off the rain. The staff here rotate between tasks – now on reception, then collecting laundry, then in the kitchen – which seems to reflect the sort of co-operative, non-hierarchical society that the Pirates, with their crowdsourced constitution and “consensual, horizontal structure”, espouse.
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