Icelanders will elect a new parliament on Saturday after disagreements over immigration, energy policy and the economy forced Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson to pull the plug on his coalition government and call early elections.
It is Iceland’s sixth general election since the 2008 financial crisis devastated the economy of the North Atlantic island nation and ushered in a new era of political instability.
Opinion polls suggest the country may be in for another upheaval, with support for the three governing parties plunging.
Mr Benediktsson, who was named prime minister in April after the resignation of his predecessor, struggled to hold together the unlikely coalition of his conservative Independence Party with the centrist Progressive Party and the Left-Green Movement.
Iceland, a country of about 400,000 people, is proud of its democratic traditions, describing itself as arguably the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy.
The island’s parliament, the Althingi, was founded in 930 by the Norsemen who settled the country.