Social Democratic Alliance

The Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin) is a social-democratic political party in Iceland. It is centre-left in alignment and currently forms part of a coalition government along with the Left-Green Movement. It became the largest party in the Icelandic parliament after the 2009 Icelandic election. The current Prime Minister of Iceland, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is the leader of the Social Democratic Alliance.

The Social Democratic Alliance was born in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 1999 as an alliance of the four left-wing parties that had existed in Iceland up till then: the Social Democratic Party (Alþýðuflokkurinn), the People's Alliance (Alþýðubandalagið), the Women's List (Samtök um kvennalista) and the National Awakening (Þjóðvaki). The parties then formally merged in May 2000. The merger was a deliberate attempt to unify the entire Icelandic centre-left into one political party capable of countering the centre-right Independence Party. The initial attempt failed however as a group of Alþingi representatives rejected the new party's platform – which was inspired by that of Tony Blair's New Labour – and broke away before the merger to found the Left-Green Movement (Vinstrihreyfingin - grænt framboð), based on more traditional democratic socialist values as well as green politics and euroscepticism.

The current chair of the party is Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland. She won the election for chairperson at the party conference on 28 March 2009 with 98% of the vote. Dagur B. Eggertsson, a member of the City Council and former mayor of Reykjavik, has been vice chair since same date; he received 65.6% of the vote. The youth wing of the Social Democratic Alliance is Social Democratic Youth (Ungir Jafnaðarmenn).