Icelandic premier in narrow election victory

Europe’s longest-serving prime minister won a narrow electoral victory today while his strongest challenger, the former Reykjavik mayor seeking to become the nation’s first female leader, failed to win a seat in Parliament.

The Icelandic election posed a choice between conservative Prime Minister David Oddsson’s 12 years of privatisation of industry, accompanied by consistent economic growth, and the progressive vision of more spending to narrow the gap between rich and poor advocated by Ingiborg Solrun Gisladottir’s left-leaning Social Alliance.