Iceland heralded a weekend election result that would have made it the first country in Europe to have more women than men in parliament. But the celebrations were brief: A late recount put it just below gender parity.
Early results showed women won 33 seats in Iceland’s 63-seat Parliament, known as the Althing, up from 24 in the previous vote. Hours later, a surprise recount in the west of the country changed the outcome, leaving female candidates with 30 seats, according to state broadcaster RUV.
That is still the highest representation for women in Europe, at nearly 48 percent, ahead of Sweden and Finland with 47 percent and 46 percent, respectively.
“The female victory remains the big story of these elections,” politics professor Olafur Hardarson told the state broadcaster after the recount.
On average, just over a quarter of legislators globally are women, according to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Only three countries — Rwanda, Cuba and Nicaragua — have more women than men in parliament, while Mexico and the United Arab Emirates have a 50-50 split.
Iceland, a North Atlantic island of 371,000 people, has been ranked the most gender-equal country in the world for more than a decade by the World Economic Forum, based on measures such as economic opportunities, education, health and political leadership. It even bettered its overall score last year at a time when global progress stagnated during the coronavirus pandemic.
The country’s prime minister is a woman, Katrin Jakobsdottir, a popular politician who led the first government to complete a full term following a decade of political turmoil.
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The three parties in the outgoing coalition government she led won a total of 37 seats in Saturday’s vote, two more than in the last election, and appeared likely to continue in power, even as her Left-Green Movement lost several seats in Parliament from the 11 it previously held.
Climate change was a defining issue of the campaign after a hot summer by Icelandic standards — with nearly 60 days of temperatures above 68 degrees — and as Iceland’s famed glaciers have been disappearing.
That didn’t appear to translate, though, into more votes for left-leaning parties that had campaigned for steeper cuts to carbon emissions ahead of the United Nations climate summit this fall in Glasgow, Scotland. The biggest victors were centrist parties. In all, eight parties are set to enter Iceland’s 1,100-year-old Parliament, according to the state broadcaster RUV.
The National Electoral Commission has not published the results on its website and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the reasons for the recount.
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Magnus David Norddahl, the head of the anti-establishment Pirate party, said he only learned about the counting discrepancies from reading local media. He told the RUV he believed there were “serious shortcomings” in the vote count.
The Pirate party’s Lenya Run Karim, a 21-year-old law student and the daughter of Kurdish immigrants, was one of those to drop out of Parliament after the recount.
She said she woke up Sunday to phone calls and messages recounting the news that she had broken records as the youngest lawmaker in Icelandic history, and the first Kurd in Parliament, only to have those milestones overturned hours later.
“Well, these were a good 9 hours,” she wrote on Twitter late Sunday.
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