Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir
Cabinet positions for the new Red-Green Socialist coalition government in Iceland were announced Sunday, with an agenda to establish “a common ownership of resources to benefit the entire nation”, a rebuilding of the economy along IMF guidelines, protection of homes and small businesses against bankruptcy, and establishing a national referendum on membership in European Union.
The most notable change in the new government comes from the naming of Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir as Prime Minister. Sigurdardóttir will not only be the first woman Prime Minister in Iceland, but the first openly-gay Prime Minister in the world. Much note has been made of this in the international press, but has been barely discussed by the Icelandic media. There has been more focus on Sigurdardóttir’s “My Time Will Come” speech of 1994, when she lost an election bid to the now-villified Central Bank head Davið Oddssson.
Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson praised the naming of Sigurdardóttir to Prime Minister as “not only a great occasion in our history, but also in the global history of the equality battle”.
The new coalition government will seek to lower interest rates while guarding the basic services and foundations of the welfare system. This balancing act between expenses and income will be done with the help of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which took over administration of the country after it’s stock market and banks crashed last October. Proposed changes at Iceland’s Central Bank, Seðlabanki, are already underway.
New Finance and Agriculture Minister, Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, said he will review Iceland’s fishing quota system. Sigfusson said he would like to see more of the fishing catch to be processed in Iceland and not exported abroad unprocessed, and will review the latest increases in fishing quotas implemented by the outgoing center-right coalition, which included an increase in whaling.
The parties of the new coalition government agree that EU membership must be decided by national elections. A committee has been established to appraise the attitude towards EU membership of different interested parties and return with their findings on April 15th.
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In governance, a person's gender, sexual orientation, race and so on won't play any role rather than the competence in providing 'timely' solutions to every problem. If Iceland government takes a small community-centric (protection of homes and small businesses against bankruptcy) approach than wholesome large bailout, Iceland will recover faster than any other European economy in the current circumstances.
Instead of punishing those responsible for mismanagement, the idiots are now giving their entire country over to socialists. This is what's called "out of the frying pan and into the fire".
Well, they don’t have David to kick around anymore….
Am I blind or she ain’t bad looking? Too bad she takes it differently.
Ummm ETB, I think that’s a pic from the early 90′s…Link to her name in the article for a more recent pic. Yikes!
this is perfectly correct
good
good wood