REYKJAVIK  -  Iceland’s opposition Social Democrats were ahead in vote counting on Sunday after a snap election prompted by the collapse of the fraught coalition government. With the ballots of more than half of eligible voters counted, the Social Democratic Alliance led by Kristrun Frostadottir were ahead of the main governing Independence Party, scoring 21.1 percent of the vote, according to broadcaster RUV. If the results hold, the party would more than double the support it saw in the last election in 2021, when it obtained 9.9 percent. “I’m extremely proud of all the work that we’ve done. We obviously see that people want to see changes in the political landscape,” Frostadottir told AFP as results started coming in late on Saturday. Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson’s Independence Party was trailing the Social Democrats with 19.3 percent, down from the 24.4 percent it won in 2021. In third place was the Liberal Reform Party with 15.8 percent. The Left-Green Movement was on track to lose all its parliamentary seats. By Sunday, it had garnered only 2.4 percent of the vote, falling below the five percent cutoff to enter parliament.

Benediktsson’s three-party, left-right coalition resigned in October, almost a year before the deadline to hold parliamentary elections.

The three-way coalition -- the Independence Party, the Left-Green Movement and the centre-right Progressive Party -- collapsed over the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers.

But in a country battling inflation and high interest rates where some 268,000 people are eligible to vote, the economy, housing and healthcare have been foremost on voters’ minds.