Gissurarson: Voters Against the Elite

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was a guest in Frosti Logason’s podcast on 19 September 2024. He said that recent elections in European countries suggested that a lot of voters who had voted for traditional centre-right parties were now voting for more populist right-wing parties. They refused to accept 1) the unlimited immigration of people from Muslim countries if and when those immigrants rejected Western values; 2) centralisation, the transfer of power from the European nation states to the Brussels bureaucracy; 3) the dominance that intolerant left-wing intellectuals had acquired over mainstream media and the universities, using it to promote wokeism and cancel culture; 4) the extension of free trade to mainland China if and when her communist rulers did not observe the rules of a fair game. European voters were rebelling against the dominant elites. Gissurarson said that the war in Ukraine should be resolved by a ceasefire, followed by free and fair elections in contested regions about whether the inhabitants wanted to belong to Ukraine or Russia, just like the elections in 1920 in Schleswig about whether the inhabitants wanted to belong to Denmark or Germany. The resolution of the conflict in the Middle East was not two states, but rather one sovereign country, Israel, which would however grant communes (or cantons) of Palestinian Arabs within her borders extensive self-government, just like Finland after 1917 granted the Aaland Islands self-government while retaining sovereignty. On the issue of Muslim immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe a distinction had to be made, Gissurarson submitted, between those who were already citizens in a European country and those who were not. Of course, under the rule of law all citizens should enjoy equal rights irrespective of their religion. But if some citizens rejected Western values and became a nuisance and even a threat without violating the law in such a way that they could be deprived of their citizenship, then perhaps they could be paid to stay away, in countries that would have them.