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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Earlier today the prime minister actually first tried to get the president to dissolve the parliament (as some kind of retaliation?), but apparently the president refused. As I understand it, this is the first time in Icelandic history that the president refuses to dissolve the parliament when asked to by the prime minister. Maybe someone here from Iceland knows...

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Yes, he was trying to retaliate against his own party for not supporting him. The president wasn't ready to approve the request without at least first talking to the leader of the other coalition party to see if they were in agreement.

http://www.visir.is/forseti-neitar-sigmundi-um-heimild-til-t...

And now it seems the former PM is accusing the president of lying..

http://www.visir.is/sigmundur-david-segir-forsetann-hafa-sag...

I'm pretty sure what happened is that he wanted the approval to dissolve the parliament, and then would then wave this authorization in the face of the other coalition party as a way to blackmail them for support.

It sounds like that Icelandic PM is a complete jerk who deserves everything that has happened to him. Obviously not putting the country first.

Yes, this is unprecedented but allowed for by the constitution. What you need to understand about the Icelandic Constitution is that it's mostly a translation from the Danish one from 1944 with patchwork reforms here and there, substituting Monarch for President. The Danish Monarchy is a figurehead not intended for much besides being a symbol of national unity. Much of the powers that the Constitution seems to grant has been interpreted to be in a similar vein to the Danish arrangements, in name only. Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has been an activist president, interpreting his role more participatory than his predecessors.

The "activist" president description is quite biased, you could just as well say that he's the first president who's been using powers legally and unambiguously granted to him by the constitution.

I for one much prefer the rule of law to the vague rule of convention by "nobody did that before so he shouldn't".

Now if people don't agree with his use of his presidential powers the right thing to do is change the constitution, not complain about ÓRG following the law and his constitutional mandate.

Activist in the sense that nobody did it before. It was not meant to speak to motives or propriety.

I understand "activist" in this context to be something closer to "interpreting the law in some unusual way nobody could have thought of when they wrote it", as opposed to "using a clause to the letter of the law in an unambiguous way and any reasonable person would agree that that was the intent of the law to begin with" which is the case with ÓLG.

I think his detractors just don't like that he shit on their parade, so instead of addressing that issue they're making this absurd argument that he used a clause of law that had never been used before and ubsetting that status quo is somehow bad, while conveniently forgetting that that unprecedented clause was invoked in the midddle of an unprecedented financial crisis.

Activist: upsetting the established order.

This would be in my opinion the best description of ÓRG while president.

Really? The best description? By that definition pretty much anyone in politics is an activist.

I think it's much more accurate to describe ÓLG as a literal constitutionalist.

He read the letter of the law and followed its mandate.

He's undoubtedly upset the established older. I'm just objecting to how that gets framed, which you can just as easily frame his actions as "nobody serving as president before him had actually read the constitution" as "he's using unprecedented powers as president".

There are people who go into politics with the status quo in mind as a policy.

It's often the case in parliamentary systems that the Prime Minster / Premier's mandate is derived from the support of the parliament. In this case, that could justify the President not acting on the Prime Minister's advice until it was clear that he did still have the support of the parliament.

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