"Pursuing studies is an investment": Interview with Lilja Rannveig Sigurgeirsdóttir

Photo: Ólafur Daði Birgisso

Translation: Victoria Bakshina

On Monday,  September 27th, two days after the election, I met Lilja Rannveig Sigurgeirsdóttir, a newly elected MP from the Progressive Party at the party's headquarters on Hverfisgata 33. Lilja is a 25-year old mother of two, and an education student, who made it into the Parliament in one of the most complex elections in the history of Iceland. We talked about everything between heaven and earth, the campaign trail, the results, still unclear at the moment of writing, and what this young politician has her heart set on.

So, you are starting a new full-time job?

Yes, and the first half of the year is basically focused on training. This is actually the most formal job you can find in Iceland. In the next few weeks, new MPs are attending tutorials, where many issues will be addressed and debated. We need to become members of various committees and then arrange them appropriately. It will certainly take the most part of half a year to organise as it marks a significant change requiring time spent to adequately kickstart activities. 

 This has been my biggest hobby since I was14-years old. So I started to take part at full force at the age of 17.  At 16 I became a member of the Progressive Party. I was fairly new when it all went out of order, at the time I was on the executive board of the Youth Movement. Then a certain interview in Kastljós was published, so I was all in, but everything was in disorder.

In your first speech, when you were a substitute MP in the last term, you talked about the dormitories in Reykjavik for high school students from the countryside. Are you going to continue fighting for it and the students in general?

I've been managing a task force where we have taken this over and offered a survey for all 10th-graders and their parents. But the task force only began taking action in March of 2020, and something else came up at the time. Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 all our meetings were carried out online. Thus, we have not yet managed to analyze the data, but it is ready for analysis. We probably need additional answers from other places, because the distribution was not sufficiently good. But this is in progress and I'm going to start working on it immediately, because equal access to studying is an incredibly important issue, in my opinion. People should be able to engage with their studies on their own terms, no matter where they live. So, distance learning needs to be available at all levels of education.

It was inspired by the result of Covid-19, but the question is whether it will be withdrawn.

I met with the rector of the University of Iceland in the summer, where I mentioned to him that one needs to make sure it doesn't get retracted. But then there are a number of Schools at the University, where lecture recording is not mandatory. I think it's very important that academic classes, which are just lectures without any practical instruction, are recorded. If distance-learning is a possibility,  it has the ability to ease the strain on student housing and can synchronously help with construction in the countryside. It also enables those mature students to study from home, such that they do not have to relocate. . I started studying political science and the classrooms were overcrowded, so I chose to study at the Iceland College of Education, where I could access my education remotely through online-learning and continue to live in the countryside. .  There are many people from the countryside at this college because it is the only provider of distance education at the University of Iceland.

However,  accommodation is not the only factor, there is so much more to it. If a person is sick at home, or with a sick child at home, or stuck at the airport etc.  - the learning process doesn’t have to suffer. We already have the technology for it. But if teachers doubt that students will not pursue their studies as successfully online, then it's the student’s fault, because they should be studying on their own terms. It is just as likely that a student who would sleep through online classes could also fall asleep in a lecture theatre. Teachers should not define our terms. I want to at least work on strengthening distance learning everywhere and assisting schools with it. In my voting district, there are three universities with very specialized programs. One needs to ensure that housing and quality are top-notch.

These universities tend to be overlooked, don´t they?

My voting district is home to two universities:  Hólar University, the Agricultural University of Iceland and the Bifröst University. These schools have had quite a huge impact on the internal structure of the region. My kids are at nursery at Bifröst, which simply would not be there if it weren't for the university. The snowball effect from these universities is immense and they have built up two whole villages there.

So we continue in the same tone and discuss the Icelandic Student Loan Fund.

Yes, we are very proud of it. But we also know that there's a lot of work to be done. Basically, the foundation of it has changed. But we have received all the comments that were made and made subsequent amendments, fixing issues that were voiced, as well working on new aspects.  The Icelandic Student Loan Fund is there to assist people with their studies and the system as a whole seems to be very good.

Readers of the paper, of course, look forward to what will be done for the students in the next term. The main issue in the wake of Covid-19 was unemployment benefits.

The Directorate of Labour is, of course, a specialized agency and what I've mainly been raising awareness on is this gap that people fall into. It's way too big and it doesn't have to be. I feel that people should be able to take student loans when they are studying. They are not supposed to worry about finances while studying, pursuing studies is an investment. I feel since studies are excluded from the scope of unemployment insurance, we should promote the use of the Icelandic Student Loan Fund and just work better with it. When the Icelandic Student Loan Fund was created, no one was expecting it [Covid-19]. This is one of those things that we need to fix. Because we want people to pursue studies, it does matter that people are learning, they do not need to stop because of financial concerns.

Another issue young people are especially concerned about is the environment. I know that many people were dissatisfied with the low score that you have got on the Sól rating from the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association. Did you do any self-reflection after that?

No, we didn't because in our policy we were not stating measurable goals and we knew it. Because we have pleaded for the readjustment of the ministries and creation of a special Ministry of Climate, which basically is there to fund research and other things. We know that we do not have a solution for climate issues and we have very few studies regarding Iceland. We want to get the research focused on us so that we see the things in the right light and it must be done immediately, so after four years we can say: "We started actively working on the climate issues," because we have not been doing it. I have in many respects considerably stronger opinions on this than many others within the party, so I think it has much more to do with the generational change, I see a lot of differences within our party than any other.

Photo: Arnar Freyr Tómasson

Do you think the rating has something to do with the average age of the candidates of the opposite parties, e.g. candidates of the Pirate Party?

I think it has more to do with the fact that many parties have a very detailed program. Our program statements were broad because our program was much larger after grassroots work and it was simplified for the election platform to accommodate most of it, but we still had the foundation from the grassroots to work on later and we reduced it simply so people could review it. What we have [behind every sentence], are all measurable goals and big issues. We are not broadcasting it because in reality, it's us, how we are going to work in the next term of office.  I think it has more to do with how much the sentences were reduced because we were trying to take all the subjects everywhere. Many parties were not talking about a variety of issues but we tried to cover everything.

 What people saw was the scale from Samtökin‘78 and Sól rating, but since there were a lot of interest groups that didn´t evaluate us, we could have undoubtedly scored higher than others. However, since we didn’t have measurable goals, I, personally, support the vast majority of the issues that were presented. A very large part of the resolutions of the AYP [Association of Young Progressists] were queer issues because we want to be a world leader in queer issues. Another thing connected to this scale was that our policies could not be accepted since we could not organize a party convention and we're a 105-year-old party, so our laws are extremely limited. There are a lot of issues that were not formally in the program statements, not because all party members disagreed on them, but because they were not formally in our register, so we could not present them as a formal policy. It is also one of the reasons why a lot of things are so open-ended, we just have to organize a party convention, where we could elect a leader and determine our priorities. All the queer issues from us in the AYP would have been directed to the party convention and finalized there, but it´s not in the public program, because it didn´t go through. We don't anticipate it to be rejected.

But since you couldn't organize a party convention it has had a bad effect on you, right?

However, this scale is an example of the absolutely amazing work these organizations have done. Incredible. But one is quite sad to be fighting for these issues and still score so low. I have the same climate anxiety as many others. That's why it is so important to have a Ministry of Climate.

I precisely wanted to come back to it. How do you imagine it?

There are conflicting opinions on it. Very. However, the ministries are supposed to reflect what is going on in the society in each case. We need to know what is going on in Iceland. We can't just rely on external research, there is simply a different climate, a different landscape, society and consumption habits. We need to investigate how we can do this in Iceland and what we need to facilitate change. We and our behaviour might benefit the entire world. That's where the Ministry of Climate steps in. We need to do this right and we need to do this immediately.