Why Iceland's ceremonial president can overrule its parliament

What the republic inherited from a Danish king

Iceland received its own constitution in 1874, closely modelled on the Danish constitution of 1849. That text handed the Althing legislative power over domestic matters such as taxation and financial allocation, and it kept the right of veto for the King, who often used it, on his ministers' advice, to refuse assent to bills the Althing had adopted.

Home rule took effect on 1 February 1904. From that date the King appointed one Minister for Iceland, who had to hold a majority in the Althing; Hannes Hafstein served from 1904 until a vote of no confidence forced him out in 1909. The Act of Union of 1 December 1918 recognised Iceland as a sovereign state joined to Denmark through the person of the King. Royal assent was still required for legislation, and the veto still stood in the constitution. It was never applied.

The republic kept the machinery and changed the occupant. German forces occupied Denmark in 1940, the Althing transferred royal powers to the Icelandic government, and on 17 June 1941 it elected a Viceroy to act as proxy for the King. Three years later, at a session held at Þingvellir on 17 June 1944, the Act of Union was repealed, the republic founded and a first President chosen. The constitution of that republic is Act No. 33 of 17 June 1944, amended on 30 May 1984, on 31 May 1991, on 28 June 1995 and on 24 June 1999.

Read cold, the document still describes a crowned head. Article 2 vests legislative power in the Althing and the President jointly. Article 15 has the President appointing ministers, discharging them and fixing their number. Article 19 makes the presidential signature the act that validates a law, once a minister has countersigned it. Article 21 has the President concluding treaties with other states. Article 13 then withdraws almost all of it in a single line: the President entrusts his authority to Ministers. How much survives that sentence is disputed among Icelandic legal scholars, and the argument has never been settled.

How one clause outranks the Althing

Article 26 is where the ceremonial reading of the office breaks down. A bill passed by the Althing must be submitted to the President for confirmation inside two weeks, and confirmation gives it the force of law. Refusal produces something stranger than a veto. The bill becomes valid anyway; it is then put, as soon as circumstances permit, to a secret ballot of everyone entitled to vote, for approval or rejection; and a law rejected in that ballot becomes void, while a law approved keeps its force.

The clause carries no threshold. It names no minimum turnout, no supermajority and no class of legislation exempt from it. One person decides whether to sign, and a refusal moves the last word on a statute from sixty-three members of parliament to an electorate that numbered 232,460 at the ballot held in April 2011.

Other provisions run the same way, moving a decision outside the chamber that took it. A President can be removed under Article 11 only by a plebiscite, called by a three-quarters resolution of the Althing, and if the plebiscite refuses the removal the Althing is dissolved and new elections called: parliament stakes its own life on the attempt. Under Article 79 a constitutional amendment passed by the Althing dissolves it at once, a general election follows, and the newly elected chamber has to pass the identical text before the President confirms it. Every change to the constitution has to survive an election held in the middle of it.

Article 5 holds a quieter oddity. A presidential candidate needs between 1,500 and 3,000 nominating voters, and where only one candidate comes forward, that candidate takes office with no ballot held at all.

Why a president refused to sign twice

Three Icelandic banks failed in the first week of October 2008. On 6 October the legislature passed an emergency law that let the Financial Supervisory Authority take control of them and made domestic deposits priority claims. Outside Iceland more than half a million depositors lost access to accounts in the foreign branches, most of them holders of Landsbanki's Icesave accounts in Britain and the Netherlands. The British government froze Landsbanki's holdings in the United Kingdom under part 2 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001; Prime Minister Geir Haarde protested that a terrorist law was being applied against his country, and more than 80,000 Icelanders signed a petition headed "Icelanders are not terrorists".

Britain and the Netherlands had paid their own depositors and wanted the money back from Reykjavík. Two successive repayment agreements were negotiated and put through the Althing. The second passed close to midnight on 30 December 2009, by 33 votes to 30, with every opposition member and two members of the Left-Green Movement against it.

A campaign group called InDefence began collecting signatures on 25 November 2009 on a petition asking the President to withhold his signature, and about 5,000 people signed in the first two days. On 2 January 2010 its spokesmen handed Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson a petition carrying 56,089 names, and on 5 January he announced that he would decline, on the ground that a matter of that size belonged to the people. The referendum followed on 6 March 2010, with 62.7% of eligible voters taking part. The bill drew 2,599 votes in favour against 134,392, with 7,240 ballots blank or void.

A third agreement, negotiated for Iceland by the American sovereign-debt lawyer Lee Buchheit, carried better terms and drew more support in business and academic circles. Grímsson refused that one too, in a declaration of 20 February 2011. At the ballot on 9 April 2011, 175,114 of the 232,460 eligible voters turned out; 103,207 rejected the deal and 69,462 accepted it, defeating it by 59.8 to 40.2.

The dispute went to court instead, and in 2013 the EFTA Court found that Iceland had been under no obligation to repay the minimum deposit guarantees to British and Dutch depositors. A report written for the Icelandic finance ministry put the liability, as first estimated, at a heavier burden per head than the reparations Finland paid the Soviet Union after the war.

How Icelanders choose their representatives

The Althing has 63 members elected for four years by proportional representation. The country is divided into six constituencies, three in the capital area and three regional, and no constituency may hold fewer than six seats. Fifty-four are constituency seats, allocated inside each constituency by the d'Hondt method; the remaining nine are equalisation seats, distributed so that each party's share of the chamber approaches its share of the national vote. Only parties polling at least 5% nationally qualify for an equalisation seat, a rule widely misread in Iceland as a threshold for entering parliament at all.

The map corrects itself for population drift. Where the number of registered voters behind each seat in one constituency falls below half the number behind each seat in another, the national electoral committee has to move seats between them. It did so after the 2003 election, transferring one seat from the Northwest constituency to the Southwest for the election of 2007, and again after 2009. Redrawing the boundaries or changing the allocation rules takes a two-thirds majority in the Althing.

Voting is open to Icelandic citizens aged 18 and over who are or have been domiciled in the country. Turnout in October 2017 reached 81.2%, and at the election of 25 September 2021 it was 80.1%, with 203,898 of 254,681 electors voting. The chamber has been unicameral since 1991, when two houses with identical membership and identical election methods were merged, and the six-constituency map dates from the constitutional amendment of 1999 and was first used in 2003.

Below the state sit 77 municipalities, grouped into eight regions. Article 78 leaves them to manage their own affairs, with their income sources regulated by law, and they carry primary education, municipal services and the administration of social programmes. Consolidation has cut their number by close to half since the 1970s. Council elections run on their own four-year cycle, most recently in 2022, separate from the parliamentary and presidential ones.

Why no party has governed alone

No single party has held a majority of seats in the Althing at any point in the republican period, so every Icelandic government has been a coalition of two or more. The constitution has the President appointing the cabinet after a general election. In practice the party leaders settle among themselves which parties will govern and how the seats are divided, and the President appoints what they bring him; the office has never had to do the job itself since 1944, though in 1942 the Regent, Sveinn Björnsson, installed a non-parliamentary government, and two years later he became the country's first President.

Since the late 1970s the Independence Party, centre to conservative in outlook, has taken between a third and two-fifths of the vote and has sat in most governments. The Progressive Party, founded in 1916 and drawing its strength from rural areas, has generally been the second largest. In 2000 three parties of the left, the Social Democratic Party, the People's Alliance and the Women's Alliance, merged into the Social Democratic Alliance, while others went instead to the Left-Green Movement, founded in 1998.

The 2008 collapse fragmented the field. More parties won seats and coalitions became harder to assemble; eight of them sat in the chamber after the general election of October 2017. The three-party government of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party and the Left-Green Movement, formed after that election, was renewed after the election of 25 September 2021, the first time since 2009 that a sitting Icelandic coalition had continued into a second term. A cabinet running from the Independence Party across to the Left-Greens spans most of the available spectrum, which is the arithmetic of a 63-seat chamber holding eight parties.

What happens when a government falls

Three governments have collapsed since the banks did, and the first set the pattern. Talks on continuing the coalition broke down in January 2009 over the Social Democratic Alliance's demand to lead it, Geir Haarde tendered the government's resignation to the President, and the President asked it to stay in place while he held talks with all five parties in the Althing. An interim government of Social Democrats and Left-Greens followed. At the election Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir's side prevailed, the first majority government of the left that Icelandic voters had returned, and she became the country's first woman prime minister and the world's first openly gay head of government.

The government of 2016 fell after the Panama Papers and the government of 2017 fell after revelations of impropriety within the political class, each with anti-government protests in the street. Organised protest against political corruption since 2008 has pressed for enactment of the constitution drafted by the left government of 2009 together with selected members of the public, and a Constitutional Council sat through 2011 and 2012. The text of 1944 remains in force.

Turnover since has been quick. Katrín Jakobsdóttir led the coalition formed in 2017 and renewed in 2021 until April 2024, when Bjarni Benediktsson of the Independence Party succeeded her as prime minister; a snap election that November made the Social Democratic Alliance the largest party and Kristrún Frostadóttir prime minister. Halla Tómasdóttir has held the presidency since 1 August 2024. The office had already produced one landmark: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, elected in 1980, was the first woman anywhere to be elected head of state, and she served four terms before standing down in 1996. The contest to replace her on 29 June 1996 drew a turnout above 86% and was won by Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson with 41% of the vote.

Who answers for a minister's conduct

Article 14 makes ministers accountable for all executive acts, allows the Althing to impeach them, and gives jurisdiction to a Court of Impeachment, the Landsdómur. In April 2010 the Special Investigative Commission on the banking collapse accused Geir Haarde and three other ministers of negligence. On 28 September 2010 the Althing voted 33 to 30 to indict Geir alone. His trial opened in Reykjavík on 5 March 2012, the first sitting the Landsdómur had ever held. On 23 April 2012 it convicted him on one of four charges, for failing to hold cabinet meetings on important state matters, and imposed no penalty, the offence being judged a minor one.

Two standing bodies do the ordinary supervision. The National Audit Bureau and the Parliamentary Ombudsman are institutions of the Althing rather than of the government, and the chamber also elects members of boards and committees that the government appoints.

The courts sit apart from both. The judiciary consists of the Supreme Court, Hæstiréttur, and a system of district courts that mostly hear civil and criminal cases together; judges are appointed for life by the minister of justice, cases are heard and decided by those judges, and Iceland has no jury system. The constitution protects the judiciary from encroachment by the other two branches, and Article 61 states that judges in their official duties are guided by the law alone.

Where Iceland stands outside the Union

Iceland has no standing army. Defence rests on a lightly armed coast guard, which also maintains the Iceland Air Defence System, and on a crisis response unit that supplies peacekeeping missions. The country was a charter member of NATO on 4 April 1949 and is the only member of the alliance without an army. An American command, the Iceland Defense Force, was stationed at Keflavík from 1951 until 2006, and the last interceptor aircraft left on 30 September 2006; NATO members have taken turns patrolling Icelandic airspace since May 2008. When Britain cancelled its scheduled patrol in December 2008, a month into the banking dispute, the political content of that arrangement became visible.

Membership elsewhere is broad. Iceland joined the United Nations on 19 November 1946 and belongs to the European Free Trade Association, the Nordic Council, the Council of Europe, the OECD and the Arctic Council. It entered the European Economic Area on 1 January 1994 and the Schengen area on 18 May 1999, which together give it the single market and open borders without a seat at the table that writes the rules.

The European Union is the exception, and the question keeps going back to the voters. The Althing voted to apply in July 2009 and the application was lodged on 17 July 2009; accession talks were suspended in 2013 after a Eurosceptic government took office; in 2015 the foreign minister informed the Union that Iceland would no longer pursue membership, leaving the application formally unwithdrawn. A non-binding referendum on resuming negotiations was held on 29 August 2026, and 52.8% voted no.

That was the same instrument used in 2010 and 2011, reached for without any presidential refusal to trigger it. Iceland: history takes up how the Althing lost its legislative power to Denmark and argued it back, and Iceland: geography the terrain the six constituencies are drawn across.