Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was prime minister of Iceland from February 2009 to May 2013, the first woman in the office and the first openly gay head of government anywhere. She was a former air hostess and union organiser who had sat in the Althing since 1978 and was its longest serving member when the pots-and-pans revolution brought Haarde's government down and the Social Democrats and the Left-Greens formed the first government of the left the republic had had, confirmed in the election of April 2009. The four years were the clearing-up. The IMF programme was carried through and completed in 2011, the capital controls kept. The banks were rebuilt as new banks with the old ones' domestic assets and the foreign creditors left with the rest. There was the special prosecutor who put twenty-odd bankers in prison, which no other country managed. There were the two Icesave bills that Grímsson refused and the country rejected, which her government had negotiated and which the EFTA court then said had not been owed. There was the application to join the European Union lodged in July 2009 and frozen in 2013 by the next government, and the constitutional assembly elected by lot and by vote whose draft the Althing never passed. The growth was back to three per cent by 2012 while the rest of Europe was in its second recession. She was born in Reykjavík, the daughter of a trade union official, and flew for Loftleiðir for nine years. She chaired the flight attendants' union and was social affairs minister for most of the years from 1987 to 1994, when she resigned from the Social Democratic leadership contest with the words my time will come, which the country remembered fifteen years later. She married a writer in a civil union in 2002 and in marriage on the day in June 2010 that her government's law made it possible. She lost the election of April 2013 to the parties she had replaced, having said she would not stand. She has kept out of public life, the woman who was there for the worst of it and handed over a country that worked.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: prime minister, trade unionist, politician
