Iceland

Iceland

What's presented here is a brief scetch of the history of the Icelandic left. In 1916 the Social Democratic Party (Althyduflokkurinn) was formed. In 1930 a split surged, thus forming the Communist Party of Iceland. In 1937 the social democrats suffered another split, and the splintergroup unified itself with the communists forming the United People's Socialist Part. The new party did not become a ComIntern member. In 1956 the UPSP created an electoral alliance with yet another left-wing split of the social democracy, thus forming the People's Alliance (AB, Athydubandalag). In 1968 AB was reconstructed as a party. The People's Alliance was clearly against NATO and the U.S. military base in Keflavik. AB is not a communist party, but it used to be the Icelandic referent of the World Communist Movement.

In the last years, the pro-communist attitude of the People's Alliance has gone lost. Today, it's more of a center-left party. This is much the work of Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, party leader between 1987 to 1995 and President of the Republic since 1996. The youth league of AB used to be ÆFAB, but it was dissolved in the mid-90's. Now AB, has a youth group called Verðandi. Prior to the 1999 elections it formed an electoral alliance (Samfylkingin) with the social democrats and the Women's List (Samtök um Kvennalista, a feminist party). Together they got 26,8% of the votes, a result which could be considered as a failure (considering that the three parties in 1995 got a total of 30,2%). There are plans to reform Samfylkingin into a unified party.

Just before these elections, a leftist minority of AB left the party and formed a new party, called the Left-Green League (Vinstrihreyfingin - Grænt Frambod). VG ran in the elections, gaining 9,1% and six seats in the Allting, which happens to be the world's oldest parliamentary assembly. It's best regional result was in Norðurland eystra (Nothern-eastern part of Iceland) were they got 22% and 2 MPs.

There has also existed and still exists, minor leftist groupings in Iceland. Among the trotskyists there are the Communist League, sister group of SWP (USA), and Stefna (Direction), a group of simpatizers of FI-USec. During the 70's marxist-leninists used to publish a paper called "Stéttabaráttan" (The Class Struggle).