The heat from the throngs slicing through the frost, Austurvöllur, the square affronting Althingi, the Icelandic parliament is heaving with the protesting masses.

Clutching her Zimmerframe and banging it against what she could to join in the racket of thousands of Icelanders drumming on iron pots and pans, a senior citizen makes herself heard. In the near distance the capital’s Christmas tree is set alight as a part of the rumbling demonstration.

My mother relays the newest update from back home as I potter along London’s Southbank, my face a grimace of both sadness that it has come to this and happiness that everyone back home is still fighting against the government that stood by while the country was dropped like a lobster into the pot of boiling fiscal failure.

As ever my mother’s news from home are glazed in a kind of heroic glamour. “Are you listening to me Nanna?” she interrupts my thoughtful silence. “The old woman was banging her Zimmerframe, her Zimmerframe! Just to be heard, we’re facing an uprising, Come home, be part of the people’s revolution!”

Reassuring my mother I expressed that I was indeed deeply impressed by the old woman who joined in the mass protest which lasted from noon Tuesday and spilled into Wednesday morning, only broken up when the police resorted to using pepper spray to disband the masses.

People don’t always associate Nordics with rampant protests, we aren’t like the French for example who strike about almost anything and, as a rule, we are definitely against any format of violent protest.

But of course that was before, before our tolerance was pulled tighter than the skin on a drum, before our bank balances plummeted as far as our employment rates, before we were declared terrorists by Brown (which coincidentally is the color of poo) and the anger that accompanies a preventable national catastrophe settles inside the hearts of the people.

Before all this happened the most controversial protests were that of Saving Iceland, a bunch of nature lovers demonstrating against drilling for energy but now protests against the government have been almost constant, growing in numbers, urgency and force as more time passes with little response to the crisis at hand.

That’s what triggered the events of Tuesday and Wednesday. If you remember a few months back the people of Iceland demanded the government hold elections as they had lost all faith in the politicians’ ability to run the country—what with their gross neglect of enforcing sound fiscal policies like that of Liechtenstein, for example, (another very small country with exceptional wealth).

Another factor being that the last poll revealed an overwhelming margin of the Icelandic people calling for a referendum on EU membership but the government sat on their hands each afraid to take responsibility or even push forth any action.

What did the government say when the Icelandic people demanded change? They said, “Thanks but no thanks, we just can’t fit it into our schedule.” An election is costly and time consuming, let’s not bother (not in those words exactly but you get my drift).

I wondered how on earth the government got away with saying something like this to the people they are meant to serve and then a quote by Thomas Jefferson flooded my mind:

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

And Icelanders fear very little except maybe waking up and finding their internet connection cut off, so really it was only a matter of time until the Icelanders got angry enough to protest the way they did on Tuesday and Wednesday and considering that the members of parliament were too scared to convene the next day, Iceland might be one step closer to liberty.

Wednesday after the protest Ágúst Ólafur Ágústsson of the Social Democratic Alliance of Iceland (Samfylkingin) commented that “Those of us who sit in parliament should not fear the people. Elections are what the people want and elections is what we should get.” He continued, “Iceland’s system failed and if system failure doesn’t call for an election I don’t know what does. People need to believe in those in charge if resurrection is to at all be possible. We need elections.”

Now it has been announced that Iceland will indeed be holding general elections on the May 9 (my birthday by the way) but here is the problem:

Now that the ball is out of the government’s court, who is going to lead the way to change? Where is our Obama? No one seems to be stepping up to the plate and we only have five months on the clock.

Nanna Árnadóttir – nannaa@hotmail.co.uk