Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson
Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson was president of Iceland from 1996 to 2016, five terms, the longest of the republic, the professor of political science and former finance minister of the left who turned an office that had never refused a law into one that did, three times. The first was the media ownership law of 2004, which his old opponent Oddsson had written to break up the Baugur group, and which the government withdrew rather than face the referendum his refusal triggered. The second and third were the Icesave bills of January 2010 and February 2011, by which the country would have guaranteed the deposits of the British and Dutch savers in the collapsed Landsbanki, four billion euros, a year's national output. The country rejected them in the referendums by ninety-three and sixty per cent. The EFTA court found in 2013 that Iceland had owed nothing. He was the president of the boom before that. He was the man who told the Walbrook Club in London in 2005 that Icelandic bankers succeeded because of the Viking spirit. He was the president of the crash of October 2008 after it, when the three banks fell in a week and the currency halved. He was still president when the country's growth had come back and the capital controls came off. He was born in Ísafjörður, and took his doctorate at Manchester. He taught the country's first political science course, and sat in the Althing for the People's Alliance. He was finance minister from 1988 to 1991, when he brought inflation down from thirty per cent. He was elected president in 1996 with forty-one per cent, unopposed in 2000, re-elected in 2004, unopposed in 2008, and re-elected in 2012 after saying he would retire. He announced in January 2016 that he would stand a sixth time. Then the Panama papers took the prime minister, and he decided, in May, that the country had had enough of him. He chairs the Arctic Circle assembly he founded in 2013. The Chinese and the Russians come to it.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: president, political scientist, politician
