The Constituent Assembly

The idea of electing a constituent assembly was not born with the left-wing government that took power in early 2009 after days of barricaded protest on the streets of Reykjavík. But circumstances had certainly transformed this rather fantastic idea into a realistic proposal. Less than two years later, an assembly existed with 25 individually elected representatives who were to begin rewriting—or revising—the Icelandic constitution in early 2011. Then came the backlash: the Supreme Court, whose role was to evaluate complaints about the elections, decided that due to a number of technical flaws in how the elections were conducted, the results would have to be annulled. ¹ This decision was fateful for the process. Parliament voted to reappoint the elected members of the Constitutional Assembly, since in spite of the conclusion that the elections had not been ideally carried out, no suspicion of fraud ever arose. ² But the process was already tainted, and the legitimacy of the reappointed Constitutional Assembly (CA) as a Constitutional Council (CC) was contested. The CC basically had the status of a parliamentary commission appointed by resolution; the status of its members was strangely undefined. ³ Most of them continued to see themselves as elected representatives of the people. Yet, critics certainly had a point when they argued that an appointed council must be seen as such and that by accepting appointment, the CC members had not resurrected their roles as representatives of the public, but, rather, had just agreed to serve on a parliamentary commission. ⁴