During the nearly half a decade she has been in office, Iceland’s prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has built a reputation for quietly obliterating expectations. She is consistently voted the most trusted politician in a country where distrust of politicians has run high since the collapse of Iceland’s banking system in 2008. Before Jakobsdóttir entered office in late 2017, Iceland went through three prime ministers in two years. She remained prime minister following the general election last September, despite her party, the Left-Green Movement, winning just 12.5 per cent of the vote. And she’s achieved political stability by forming coalitions with parties on the right.
“I won’t say it’s not difficult to be in government with difficult parties – oh, I mean with different parties,” she told me during a video call from Stjornarradid, the prime minister’s office in Reykjavik. Chuckling at her mistake, Jakobsdóttir continued: “Well, also difficult parties. But it was a Freudian slip there.”
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