The three Scandinavian countries continue to have their monarchs. Even though progressive people every now and then say that in theory they would be in favor of getting rid of the king, in practice there is no movement toward that. The main reason seems to be that everyone is afraid of what the alternative would be, and a president like Mr. Trump does not seem like an attractive alternative to most. But is that the only alternative? In this article, I try to get an overview.
Norway was the last country in the Nordics to opt for a monarchy after independence in 1905: in the referendum of 12–13 November 1905, about 79% voted to keep the monarchy, and Prince Carl of Denmark became King Haakon VII. When the turn came to Finland (independent from 6 December 1917) and Iceland (a republic from 17 June 1944) to form independent countries, they chose the more modern republican form of government. Finland actually first elected a German prince as king in October 1918, and only became a republic in 1919 after he renounced the throne.
Now, more than 120 years later, none of the original monarchies have switched. And it’s not because there haven’t been scandals around the royals, or that they don’t cost society1. Nor is it because Scandinavians haven’t figured out that it’s quite risky to have an unelected random person represent the country — as when the Swedish king, Carl XVI Gustaf, showed up at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 and questioned how much Europe should have to pay for the climate transition (“How much are we actually supposed to pay?”), earning a public rebuke from Sweden’s own climate minister. The fear is that the alternative could be worse: a president. Potential presidents could be former prime ministers like former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg or Erna Solberg for Norway, Carl Bildt or Stefan Löfven for Sweden, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt or Anders Fogh Rasmussen for Denmark. While each of them has their supporters, they are also controversial for those who didn’t like their time in office, and many would be afraid of giving them presidential, Trump-like powers to start renaming things and starting (trade) wars with the neighbors.
There is more than the president-led republic
For some reason, most seem to think that the president-led republic is the only alternative to the current system of a parliament with a monarch with symbolic powers. That may have been the case 200 and 150 years ago, but today we should have more options.
The weak presidential system
This first category is what seems closest to the current parliament-led constitutional monarchy: it is still parliament that elects a prime minister, who leads a government and who is still effectively going to be perceived as the leader of the country. The president does exist, but the president has as many powers as the monarch currently has — mostly symbolic. The president can either be chosen indirectly (as in Germany, where a special Federal Convention made up of Bundestag members and state delegates elects the president) or directly (as in Ireland).
The advantage of this system would be that it could be implemented with minimal changes. A controversial politician, like Sylvi Listhaug of the anti-immigration FrP party, may still end up being president one day, but given that the role is largely ceremonial, she would probably not seek that position before retiring from active politics.
The disadvantage of choosing this system would be precisely that: not much would change, and one has lost a golden opportunity to switch to a fundamentally better system. The presidents in this system tend to live in a castle or a castle-like building, with corresponding maintenance costs, even though the role of the president is fairly limited.
Ceremonial president on rotation
The next step would be not to have a single person act as president, but to do it on a rotational basis. In Switzerland, a seven-member Federal Council acts as collective head of state, with the ceremonial presidency rotating annually among them. No one person becomes a populist cult figure, because the office is deliberately designed to be boring. Other examples are Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three-member presidency (one Bosniak, one Croat, and one Serb) with the post of the chair rotating every eight months, and San Marino’s two Captains Regents who are elected for 6 month terms.
The advantage of this system would be that it would lessen the personality cult that has formed around some figures in Scandinavian politics — such as Jens Stoltenberg, who at times seemed to be Norway’s only candidate for any major job — or current Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, who seems always to be at the centre of attention no matter whether she is running a progressive or a conservative government.
An advantage of choosing this system is that it’s proven to work elsewhere. And while it’s more different from the current system than the weak presidential system, it should be possible to combine it with most of the rest of the parliamentary system that the Scandinavian countries already have.
Disadvantages would be that this system is also rather old (Switzerland has used it since 1848) and that it doesn’t make use of all that is possible in our day and age.
Sortition / lottocracy
This is where we start seeing the new possibilities of the 21st century, and it would not just involve a reform of the post of the president.
A proposal that has come up is a system where random citizens are selected to be the ones to make the decisions. The idea is that if the selection is just random enough, then the citizens selected will, on average, represent the entire population, and they will actually more accurately represent the population than if they had been selected by vote.
In classical Athens, the heartland of democracy, most public offices were not filled by election at all but by lot. From 487/486 BC onward, even the archons were chosen by lottery, and the Council of 500, the body that prepared all decisions of the People’s Assembly, consisted of citizens drawn by lot from the districts in proportion to their population, serving one-year terms. The Athenians considered elections an aristocratic device that favoured the rich and the famous; the lottery was the democratic one. They even built a dedicated randomization machine, the kleroterion, to make the process tamper-proof.
The idea has returned in our time in the form of citizens’ assemblies. Ireland is the best-known example: when the abortion question had deadlocked its politics for decades, parliament handed it to a Citizens’ Assembly of 99 randomly selected citizens, chosen to mirror the population by gender, age, region and social class. The assembly heard experts and campaigners over several weekends and recommended liberalization — and in May 2018, two-thirds of Irish voters followed its lead in a referendum, even though the political establishment had considered the assembly’s proposal too radical. The same method had earlier prepared Ireland’s 2015 same-sex-marriage referendum, recommended by a constitutional convention of 66 randomly chosen citizens and 33 politicians and passed with 62% of the vote. Belgium’s small German-speaking community has gone furthest: since 2019 it has a permanent Citizens’ Council of 24 lottery-drawn members that convenes citizens’ assemblies whose recommendations parliament is obliged to answer within a year — a randomly selected third branch of democracy, next to parliament and government.
Similarly, the president could be selected by lottery and rotate on a weekly or monthly basis.
Liquid democracy
Liquid democracy is a combination of direct and representative democracy.
Direct democracy — where people get to vote on things directly, without the middlemen known as politicians, on a national and international scale — is what a lot of us in the 1990s thought would come automatically with the rise of the internet and the possibility of global real-time communication. However, a disadvantage of direct democracy is that it requires time to participate in all meetings and be prepared for every vote. Liquid democracy solves this issue by letting citizens delegate their vote to a politician, and this delegation can be limited in time or subject matter. Most importantly, it can be recalled, and citizens can vote directly on issues as well — for example because they care strongly about a specific issue.
The model of Liquid Democracy has been trialled in the German Pirate Party. A criticism that has come up is that there is not as much ballot secrecy when one delegates a vite to someone directly and that some people can accumulate a lot of voting power (so-called “super-voters”). A study on that has however found that in many cases the super-voters end up voting with the majority and therefore have a stabilizing effect2.
With politicians partially being replaced by ordinary citizens when it comes to decision-making, some of those politicians could take on the ceremonial duties of the president.
Is a head of state really needed?
Nearly every country has a rectangular flag (Exceptions are Nepal’s flag with two stacked pennons; and Switzerland and the Vatican using square flags) and a person acting as head of state. But is that a law of nature? Could one not just avoid having one altogether? There is now an established system of international relations, and if one country wants to send its head of state to another country, it expects to meet the head of state there. But what would happen if a country just didn’t have one? It doesn’t seem strictly necessary, and one could have the chairman of parliament take over or delegate some of these roles while the government takes care of the rest.
Will it ever happen?
As someone with a democratic mindset living in Scandinavia, it is difficult to understand why it has not yet happened. The reality, though, is that despite having all the technology and education in place that would be required, Scandinavia is not exactly a first mover when it comes to the organisation of the state. I would expect that many other countries will get to a more democratic form of government long before Denmark, Norway or Sweden get there.
- Cost estimates are typically around 20-50 million Euros/year in each country. ↩︎
- See study https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14618 ↩︎