Social Democrat Frostadóttir becomes the new Prime Minister of Iceland

Social Democratic Alliance has reached an agreement with the Liberal Reformist Party and the People’s Party

Dec. 21 () –

The social democrat Kristrún Frostadóttir has become the new prime minister of Iceland this Saturday after the agreement reached between her formation, the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin), and the center-right parties Liberal Reformist Party and the People’s Party.

Frostadóttir has thus become the youngest prime minister in the country’s history and the youngest prime minister in the world in office at the head of a government with four ministries for the Social Democrats and the presidency of Parliament.

The Liberal Reformist Party will have four ministers and the People’s Party, three, according to the pact approved by the three formations together with the coalition government program. It is also the first Icelandic government with more women than men.

Samfylkingin, led by economist Kristrún Frostadottir, took 15 of the 63 seats in the Icelandic Parliament by collecting 20.8 percent of the vote, one seat more than the conservative Independence Party of the current Prime Minister, Bjarni Benediktsson ( 19.4 percent of votes, for a total of 14 seats).

At a press conference, Frostadóttir applauded the success of the talks that grant “a very strong mandate” to the three parties, with more than the majority of seats in Parliament.

The coalition, which will have a total of 36 seats out of the 63 that make up the chamber, will replace the outgoing cabinet of current Prime Minister Benediktsson, defeated by voters angered by the rise in the cost of living and the housing shortage.

Frostadóttir thus becomes the new prime minister of the country, at the head of a cabinet that reduces the number of portfolios from twelve to eleven and under the promise, in a press conference reported by the state public radio and television station RUV, of organizing a national referendum on the continuation of the country’s accession negotiations to the EU no later than 2027.

Iceland has been a member of the European Economic Area, an extension of the EU single market, since 1994 along with Norway and Liechtenstein. In 2009, under the leadership of the Social Democrats, it requested entry into the bloc, but negotiations for its entry were suspended in 2015 after the change of government.