Social Democrats win Iceland’s snap elections as incumbents punished 

Iceland’s centre-left Social Democratic Alliance has won the most votes in snap elections prompted by the collapse of the coalition in power for the past seven years, the final count shows.

The Social Democrats won 15 seats in the 63-seat parliament, the Althingi, with 20.8 percent of the votes, state broadcaster RUV reported on Sunday.

The conservative Independence Party, which led the outgoing government, won 14 seats with a 19.4 percent vote share, and the centrist Liberal Reform Party won 11 seats and 15.8 percent of the votes. Three other parties also won seats.

Icelanders voted on Saturday after disagreements over immigration, energy policy and the economy forced Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson to pull the plug on his coalition government and call early elections.

This weekend’s results more than doubled the share the Social Democrats won in the previous election in 2021.

“I’m extremely proud of all the work that we’ve done. We obviously see that people want to see changes in the political landscape,” Social Democratic leader Kristrun Mjoll Frostadottir said as results started coming in.

Frostadottir, 36, will likely try to seek coalition partners to command a parliamentary majority.

“It very much depends on whether she can convince the president that she is the most likely to be able to form a coalition,” Stefania Oskarsdottir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland, told the Reuters news agency.

“It seems that the Reform Party is critical in this because they have the option of joining a coalition with the Social Democrats and the People’s Party, and they also have the option of forming a coalition with the Independence Party and the Centre Party,” Oskarsdottir said.

The Pirate Party lost all of its seats in this election, meaning that only six parties will have seats in the new parliament.

Frostadottir has pledged to address the country’s cost of living crisis, which has been caused by inflation and high borrowing costs – a challenge faced by countries worldwide in recent years and a thorn in the side of incumbent parties, including the Democrats in the United States.

In February 2023, inflation peaked at 10.4 percent in Iceland. While inflation slowed to 5.1 percent in October, it is still significantly higher than in much of the rest of the world.

By comparison, inflation in the US stood at 2.6 percent last month while the European Union’s rate was 2.3 percent

Public finances have also been strained by repeated volcanic eruptions in southwestern Iceland, which have displaced thousands of people. Migration has also been a key issue in this election, as Iceland struggles to accommodate asylum seekers.

The number of refugees seeking protection in Iceland jumped to more than 4,000 in each of the past three years, compared with a previous average of fewer than 1,000. Iceland has a population of fewer than 400,000 residents.