From Resurrection and New Dawn to the Pirate Party : political party names as symbolizing recent transformations in the political field in Iceland

2008 saw the beginning of a massive financial crisis in Iceland, marked by the collapse of the banking system, the failure of state pension funds, and months of political upheaval. Angry and bewildered Icelanders, newly aware that their image of themselves as exceptional and egalitarian new age Vikings was hollow, and that the pre-crash rhetoric of ‘prosperity for all’ had only ever been ‘prosperity for the very few’, sought to reconfigure the political field. New parties, with new names that signified a very different conceptualization of Iceland and Icelanders, emerged. In this paper we examine the move in Iceland from a handful of parties which drew on a common symbolization of Iceland as a classless society rooted in land and shared history, to the contemporary plethora of parties which promise, for example, a ‘bright future’, or style themselves as ‘pirates’ who will re-start Iceland.