Now & Then: Prime Jailhouse, Minister Rock

From prison to PM’s offices

Marking the beginning of the school year, we wrote in the last issue about the oldest school in Iceland, situated on Lækjargata, in a building from 1846. This time, marking the beginning of a new parliamentary year, we want to talk about a building that is just up that same road — the offices of the prime minister.

The 18th century is the bleakest Icelanders have endured; plagues, famines, worsening climate and volcanic eruptions made life on the island unbearable. In the famine-ridden 1750s, the highest ranking official of the Danish crown in Iceland proposed the building of a penitentiary to deal with the wave of vagabonds, robbers and thieves, who roamed the country during the famine. In 1759, a new property tax was levied on Icelanders to pay for such a building, and construction began in 1761. It took ten years to complete. The new jail was designed to hold 16 hardened criminals and 54 regular ones. The building served its original purpose for just under 50 years, when the Napoleonic wars, with its naval blockade of, amongst other places, Denmark and Iceland, made it impossible to maintain operations in the building. By 1820, it had been converted into the residency of the highest-ranking magistrate in Iceland.

This building was designed and built to hold 70 inmates, today it holds one prime minister

Instead of — yet again — milking the prison metaphor to make a joke about power, we should rather — this time around — ponder the fragility of democracy. Iceland’s independence was hard-earned and came in stages. The democracy that came with it wasn’t self-evident. The challenges faced by Iceland’s government 100 years ago were immense. There wasn’t any infrastructure. There wasn’t really anything. Iceland was one of the poorest countries in Europe. Everything had yet to be built, but the population bought into it. They bought into the idea that with independence and freedom comes responsibility and effort. We had “a republic, if [we could] keep it.” A century on, many voters are not aware of the effort and struggle it took to get our freedom and democracy to begin with. We take our freedom for granted. We take democracy for granted. We tend to look at it as only giving us benefits, and often forgotten is the fact that we also have obligations to maintain it.

In an interview in this issue, the current occupant of the prime minister’s office, Kristrún Frostadóttir, warns how easy it is to lose this precious possession, and end up floating on the same body of water that many other western states are currently drifting on, towards the shores of broken, botched democracies, into the grasp of authoritarianism.