Athyglisvert er að sjá umfjöllun Economist um Davíð Oddsson í nýjasta tölublaðinu:

Hvað finnst þér um þetta?


David Oddsson, Iceland’s Eurosceptic leader
Apr 12th 2001
From The Economist print edition


WITH his impish manner and unruly quiff of hair, David Oddsson, Iceland’s conservative prime minister, has the look of a bard. Fittingly so, since he moonlights as a playwright and short-story writer. The reviews of his work have been mixed, but no matter: Mr Oddsson is not giving up his day job any time soon. He was elected mayor of Reykjavik, the capital, at 34 and left that job to become prime minister, in 1991, at 43. A decade on, he is Europe’s longest-serving prime minister—and plans to extend his record by seeking re-election in 2003, when his current term is up.

Mr Oddsson is the polarising sort, the most liked and disliked politician in the island. “Oh yes, David likes his opinions,” says a knitwear salesman. David, note, not Oddsson; in Iceland everyone, it seems, is on first-name terms. Such is the scale of the place that disgruntled voters often ring “David” at his office and get put through. Such is the scale that Mr Oddsson often takes the call.

There are only 280,000 Icelanders, but their island is better connected to the world, by air and sea, than are some European cities with far more people. It is connected in other ways too: Iceland claims to have the highest rate of mobile-phone and computer usage in the world. It maintains a dozen or so embassies, is a member of NATO (although it has no armed services of its own), and is acknowledged to have some of the world’s leading experts on maritime law—the better to assert claims to the fishing grounds that were once its only significant natural resource and that still employ about a tenth of its workforce and supply two-thirds of its exports of goods. Its national football team in 1998 managed to beat Russia’s. Remarkable? Mr Oddsson thinks not. “It’s just that we keep forgetting how small we are.”

Conservatives have always done better in Iceland than in the rest of the Nordic world, where social democrats predominate. Mr Oddsson’s Independence Party has been in power, alone or in coalition, for most of the past 50 years. Icelanders put this conservative streak down to a strong work ethic: men and women do not retire until 70. But theirs is a distinctly qualified sort of conservatism; even entrepreneurial Icelanders want to see their country’s generous welfare system kept in being. Still, Iceland has moved sharply to the right under Mr Oddsson. His party increased its share of the vote in the last general election, in 1999, to 41%, from 37% in 1995, and won 26 of parliament’s 63 seats, enough for it to carry on governing in a cosy coalition.

The state still owned industries and banks when Mr Oddsson came to power. Icelanders thought their institutions too small and fragile for the free market. Mr Oddsson saw things differently. Red tape and protected markets, he reckoned, were holding his countrymen back. Old regulations were binned, financial markets created and listless state companies privatised. The results have been good. The economy has grown by a quarter since 1995. Real wages have risen and—more remarkably—the poor have gained most. Iceland expects to be free of public debt by 2004.

Unemployment is down to 1%, so low that Iceland’s fish- processors have to import Poles to gut their fish. The last two state banks and Iceland Telecom are up for sale this year. There is talk of spending $1 billion to build a new aluminium smelter, Iceland’s third, in the east of the country, tapping into its cheap and clean geothermal energy. Tourism continues to grow at a rapid pace. Iceland’s farmers, long used to scratching a hard living from their unfertile land in its cool climate, now hope to export their clean beef and lamb at a premium in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak in Europe.

Still, Mr Oddsson is not satisfied. He wants to slash profits tax from 30% to 15%, in part to lure back Icelandic companies registered offshore. And he is pressing Icelanders to shift from reliance on natural resources, including maritime ones, to a knowledge-based economy. Iceland should be as well-known for its software, he says, as for its fish. Companies such as deCODE, a genetics company that plans to sell data about the island’s closely related people to others studying DNA, are already making an impact. Not before time, indeed, as the fisheries grow less abundant.

Still, to most people Iceland means fish. Mr Oddsson claims that its fishermen are five times more productive than Norwegian ones. It depends what you mean by “fisherman” and by “productive”. Iceland has made a private, sellable commodity of its fishing grounds. Fishermen get a quota according to their experience, but they can, and some do, sell it on to bigger and more efficient companies. Unsurprisingly, this is politically controversial.

Another hot political debate is over the continuing drift of rural Icelanders, especially the young and educated, to Reykjavik. Some 70% of Icelanders now live in or around the capital. One answer may be to move some government agencies away from Reykjavik.

What few people seriously debate is whether or not to join the European Union. Suggestions that Iceland should do so have been made cautiously on the left, and by some businessmen, who say they might be happy to swap the Icelandic krona, which fell in value by 13% last year, for the euro. “I don’t see any arguments for joining,” says Mr Oddsson bluntly. Iceland, he says, already gets access to the European market thanks to its membership, along with Norway and Liechtenstein, of the European Economic Area. Joining the EU proper, Mr Oddsson believes, would mean giving up sovereignty for a marginal voice, at best, in Brussels.

But then Mr Oddsson is a hardened Eurosceptic. He approves of enlarging the EU club only as a way to make Europe’s market bigger; he derides ideas for political union. “They never know where to stop. With every summit, it’s always one step closer to a federal Europe.” Pollsters say that most Icelanders agree with him, especially for fear that the EU would demand control over their fishing grounds as the price of admission. “You can be a fine European without giving up sovereignty,” says Mr Oddsson. Especially if you have lots of cod and capelin to keep you going.