Icelandic media misrepresents statistics

On April 25^th, 2026, one of the biggest news outlets in Iceland, Morgunblaðið, posted an article about how 70% of those on benefits in the city of Reykjavík are foreigners, or 783 people out of 1173 in total, and while unemployment has steadily decreased for both foreigners and natives in the last four years, the percentage of foreigners in that metric has increased.

The article doesn’t outright lie, that does appear to be a real statistic, but it does something even more frustrating: It omits context to the detriment of the broader issue. One thing that stands out in the report they got the numbers from is how Icelandic people far outweigh others when it comes to disability benefits but are outweighed by a factor of four when it comes to unemployment benefits. The explanation for that is completely omitted from the article. Social statistics don’t exist in a vacuum, and not diving into the reasons behind them in a news article about them amounts to journalistic malpractice. You can’t just stop asking questions when you stumble onto an answer that fits your narrative, which is what a lot of people have done with this article if the Facebook comments are anything to go by. And I don’t want to shit on the writer himself, he’s young and just summarizing a report like he was likely asked to do by his boss. The editors would still have caught this if they cared about doing actual journalism.

The intent behind the article is not what is on trial here, but moreso the real-world consequences of this type of negligent “journalism”. Iceland’s xenophobia has been increasingly rearing its ugly head in the last few years, with the far-right party ironically named the Centre-party (they self-proclaim centrism) gaining more support by means of grievance politics and nationalist rhetoric. Their surge in popularity is on par with other similar parties all over the world. The AFD in Germany, the Reform party in the UK or the FdI in Italy whose leader is their current prime minister. The Centre-party is led by Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, a tax dodger who is, at this point, best known for eating raw ground beef on a boulder. Despite his many, many shortcomings, he has garnered a cult of personality by using Boris Johnson-esque “weird-goober-who’s-secretly-smarter-than-he-looks” tactics. His party leads the ongoing campaign for stricter immigration laws, with some members saying that Iceland should only accept immigrants from predominantly white nations, couching it in “within the EEA” language for plausible deniability, and their rhetoric is causing a lot of harm to local immigrant communities.

If you’re an Icelandic local, white, fluent in the language without an accent and have a fully Icelandic name, you have privilege which you might be completely unaware of. Compared to someone who’s not, you have an easier time getting a job interview, it’s easier for you to get accepted for a place to rent, and interacting with the community includes a lot less friction. Sometimes you may even get a job you’re underqualified for simply because you were the only Icelandic applicant. You may still have problems and I’m not saying your life is easy, but your cultural or racial identity has nothing to do with them. If you lack even one of those features, you will run into some issues. Many places of employment are less likely to take your resume seriously if you have a foreign name or submit your resume in English, and if they do, they may try to pay you less because they’ll assume you don’t know your rights as an employee, you’ll get passed over for promotions, you’re constantly reminded of your foreigner label in your daily life in any activity from buying groceries to joining a social club.

The logical result of that is a lot of people who are stuck on unemployment benefits because they can’t get a job interview despite actively trying to. Then the media can take those raw, out of context numbers and show everyone how the lazy foreigners are just here to bleed our systems dry, thus continuing the cycle. Two of the biggest online news outlets in Iceland, MBL and Vísir, have been known to do stuff like this on purpose because while they get some money for operation costs from the government, they are ultimately companies who have to turn a profit, and nothing draws eyes like ragebait. It just so happens that a certain type of ragebait often works in favour of the far-right, and an argument can be made that their resurgence is in some part a result of the attention economy.

The Icelandic far-right is an interesting phenomenon. They try to copy off of the Americans’ homework but then do so incompetently, because the groundwork for them hasn’t been laid in the same way as it has with our strange friends in the west, so they try to invent their own localized version of it. They often appeal to a sense of nostalgia, but while in the US that means a white nuclear family on a single income, here that apparently just vaguely means something with fish, falcons, wool sweaters, and national flags. Iceland has always been cold and grey, so the cultural nostalgia doesn’t hit quite the same.

The centre-party is full of people who either failed out of other political parties or have had trouble keeping a high-paying job with responsibilities and are just looking for something cushy, and they will say and do anything to be able to do nothing. They’re not here to help the citizens or make society better in any way, they’re just here to leech off the taxpayer while contributing nothing to the nation and not interacting with its actual culture. It’s “no, you!” the political philosophy.

Using vulnerable social groups as political pawns is par for the course. Conservatism has done nothing for the majority of people who vote for it, most of whom belong to the very working class they continue to subjugate by means of high taxation compared to their rich friends and themselves as well as union busting, so what they resort to is tapping into grievances. Everywhere they have gained power they’ve made life measurably worse for the average person, so they can’t sell their campaign on their own merit. The Icelandic right has been getting more MAGA coded lately, whining about rainbow flags and dead foreign conservative pundits on Facebook while staying completely silent when it comes time to condemn Israel’s genocide of Palestinians or even cheering for it. If this goes unchecked, which I fear it will, the far-right will come to power in Iceland. The Icelandic political system is entrenched in such a way that if a tyrannical party seizes power, the damage they will be able to do is immeasurable. We have placed too much trust in the government and not pushed back against them enough when they expand the extent of their power, and the result is a loaded gun on a table just waiting to be picked up.

All this is not to say that the current liberal government is good. They’re setting up prison camps for foreigners and defending creeps on chuddy podcasts. They are a mess and will likely be the reason for a hard pendulum swing towards the far-right, though the real reason for that could just be their ineffective housing policies and general nothingburger platitudes when it comes to the economy or the rights of minority groups.

The current far-right wave has been, at least in part, financed by oil and gas companies and their puppet thinktanks and media outlets. It’s no secret that the Daily Wire, for instance, was founded with cash from the Wilks brothers, who made their billions fracking for natural gas. A fortune they have since funnelled into the pockets of various right-wing politicians and pundits to spread doubt about climate change. Another staple in this disinformation industry is a little company known as Koch Industries. The Petro-chem giant has, under its various foundations, been the dark money behind the entire climate change denial and culture war industrial complex that has bogged our society down for the last few years. A meeting financed by them via Turning Point Action was attended by none other than the leader of the Centre-party, Sigmundur Davíð.

The article is a thoughtless piece of accidental propaganda that creates permission for xenophobia, but if the context behind it is understood correctly, it could in theory cause employers to be more considerate to the unemployment problem of immigrant communities, but that may just be cope on my part. Moreover, we have this rising frustration with the status quo, especially when it comes to work. People are miserable. The politicians know that and are more than willing to give them a convenient scapegoat, whether it be the queer community or immigrants. They appeal to their alienation and vague sense of anomie by tapping into their anger. And of course there are those who will find ways of gaming the system to escape it in some way, but the vast majority don’t. The problem is not immigrants; it’s the flailing death-throes of late-stage capitalism and a system hell bent on keeping that zombified corpse limping forwards at all costs. It’s a cornered animal that’s scratching and biting anything it sees to defend itself, and it will continue doing so until it dies in agony.