Ástþór Magnússon Wium
businessperson
Ástþór Magnússon Wium (born 4 August 1953) is an Icelandic businessman and peace activist, who is best known for being the founder of the first credit card company in Iceland and as a perennial candidate for the office of President of Iceland.
Background and education
After finishing the landspróf (national examination), Ástþór studied at the Commercial College of Iceland before moving to the United Kingdom in order to study commercial photography and marketing at the Medway College of Art and Design.
Business career
Ástþór brought Eurocard to Iceland in 1979, making it the first credit card company operating in Iceland. The success of Eurocard made him financially independent.
Political career
Ástþór unsuccessfully campaigned for the post of President of Iceland five times: in 1996, 2004, 2012, 2016, and 2024. In 2000, he failed to get the necessary 1,500 signatures and therefore was not on the ballot. On 1 June 2012, his candidacy was revoked because he had failed to obtain the mandatory certificate from the senior electoral officer in the Northwest constituency; as he was the only challenger in 2000, this meant that the sitting President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson was re-elected unopposed. In the 2004 election, he got 1.9% of the total vote, and in 2016 he got 0.3%.
Ástþór was the founder and chairperson of the Democracy Movement, a political party founded in 1998 for the purpose of promoting direct democracy and e-democracy. The party folded after the 2009 general elections.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ástþór Magnússon Wium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.