Parliamentary elections were held in Iceland on 30 November 2024 to elect the 63 members of the Althing. The centre-left Social Democratic Alliance, led by Kristrún Frostadóttir, outperformed the ruling Independence Party to win the most seats, at 15. The election saw the worst performance by the Independence Party, Progressive Party, the Left-Green Movement, and the Pirate Party in each of the parties' histories, while Viðreisn, the People's Party, and the Centre Party saw their best performance in each of the parties' histories. This follows a trend of Icelanders voting against every post–2008 recession government except during the 2021 election.
The Left-Green Movement and the Pirate Party lost all of their parliamentary representation, with each failing to obtain a seat for the first time since their foundation in the 1999 and 2013 elections, respectively.
Background Previous election
The 2021 parliamentary election took place on 25 September, a month before the latest date allowed by law. The government coalition of the Left-Green Movement, the Progressive Party and the Independence Party, led by prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, had been in place since the 2017 elections. This unusual coalition of parties from the left wing, the center and the right wing of Icelandic mainstream politics maintained its majority in parliament in the elections as the Independence Party had the same number of seats as before while the Progressive Party added 5 seats and the Left-Green Movement lost 3. As for the opposition parties, the People's Party gained two seats and Viðreisn gained 1 seat. The Pirate Party held steady but the Social Democratic Alliance lost 1 seat and the Centre Party lost 4 of its seats in parliament. The Icelandic Socialist Party received 4.1% of the vote but no seats as 5% of the national vote is needed to be eligible for the allocation of leveling seats.
The coalition partners from the previous term soon decided that the first option for coalition talks should be to renew their coalition. The second cabinet of Katrín Jakobsdóttir was then formed on 28 November.
Fall of government In April 2024, Katrín Jakobsdóttir resigned to contest the 2024 Icelandic presidential election, which she lost. She was succeeded as prime minister by Bjarni Benediktsson.
On 13 October, prime minister Bjarni Benediktsson announced that the government had collapsed due to disputes over foreign policy, asylum seekers, and energy, prompting him to call for new elections and ask President Halla Tómasdóttir the next day to dissolve the Althingi and set the elections for 30 November. In particular, Bjarni cited "how different the Movement's vision for the future is, compared to what I want to stand for".
Issues In November 2024, a Gallup poll found that more than 60% of voters regarded healthcare, economic issues and housing as a top concern. Immigration was regarded as a key issue by 32% of those surveyed while asylum issues accounted for 18% of respondents. The public broadcaster RÚV said that an AI chatbot set up to answer election-related questions received mostly queries on housing and taxation.
Electoral system
The 63 members of the Althing are elected by open list proportional representation in six multi-member constituencies, with 54 seats allocated to parties at the constituency level with no electoral threshold, and 9 leveling seats assigned to party lists at the national level in order to ensure proportionality with the election result, with a threshold of 5 percent required. The 54 constituency seats are distributed within each constituency according to the D'Hondt method. Election lists are determined by parties; although voters have the option of altering the order of candidates or striking out particular candidates entirely, this rarely has any effect on the result.
The number of voters per parliamentary seat varies significantly between the constituencies of Iceland. The number of seats per constituency was determined by law in 1999 and is not updated before each election except when the number of voters per representative in the most represented constituency reaches half the number of voters per representative in the least represented constituency. The constitution stipulates that in this case, a constituency seat should be transferred from the most represented constituency to the least represented constituency. This has happened twice since 1999, in both cases transferring a constituency seat from the Northwest constituency (a large rural constituency) to the Southwest constituency (a relatively small constituency in area, adjoining the capital city). In the 2021 election, the number of eligible voters for each seat in the Southwest was 5671.5, more than double the 2693.5 eligible voters for each seat in the Northwest. According to the constitution, this means another transfer of a constituency seat from the Northwest to the Southwest before this election.
Date Per Article 23 in Chapter V of Act No. 112 from the 25 June 2021 Elections Law, elections must be held no later than the same weekday of the month four years after the previous elections, counting from the turn of the month; therefore, because the 2021 election took place on the fourth Saturday in September, the latest possible date for the election was 27 September 2025.
Following the collapse of the government in October 2024, the election was held on 30 November.
Political parties
The table below lists political parties participating in the election. This list also includes the percentages and Althing seats of the parties after the 2021 parliamentary election.
Name Ideology Position Leader 2021 result Votes (%) Seats D Independence Party Centre-right Bjarni Benediktsson 24.4% B Progressive Party Nordic agrarianismLiberalism Centre to centre-right Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson 17.3% V Left-Green Movement Democratic socialismEco-socialism Centre-left to left-wing Svandís Svavarsdóttir 12.6% S Social Democratic Alliance Social democracyPro-Europeanism Centre-left Kristrún Frostadóttir 9.9% F People's Party PopulismDisability rights Centre to centre-left Inga Sæland 8.8% P Pirate Party Pirate politics colspan=2 8.6% C Viðreisn LiberalismGreen liberalism Centre to centre-right Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir 8.3% M Centre Party ConservatismRight-wing populismNordic agrarianism Right-wing Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson 5.4% J Icelandic Socialist Party Left-wing Sanna Magdalena Mörtudóttir 4.1% Y Responsible Future Right-wing Jóhannes Loftsson 0.1% L Democratic Party Right-wing Arnar Þór Jónsson Did not exist
Opinion polls