A handful of Icelanders discovered that they had accidentally submitted their candidacy for the presidential election, scheduled for June 1 in the country. Some of these stunned people tell BFMTV.com of their surprise or their panic upon discovering their name in the official list of the authorities.
Candidate in spite of herself. Alda Guðrún Jónasdóttir was stunned last March when she received a call from her mother. The latter wanted to know why her name appeared among the official list of contenders for the Icelandic presidential election scheduled for this Saturday, June 1, alongside around 80 other candidates.
“I said to myself: ‘Wow, but what is this mess?’, but I must say that it immediately made me laugh a lot,” this Icelandic model tells BFMTV.com .
And for good reason, this 35-year-old woman never intended to run and she didn’t even know that her name was on the list. “It’s a big mistake! I know absolutely nothing about politics, it doesn’t even interest me,” she jokes today.
“A really, really stupid mistake.”
In reality, Alda Guðrún Jónasdóttir simply wanted to support her favorite candidate for the election by providing her sponsorship on the official website provided for this purpose. Because for the very first time, registration takes place entirely online. But like a dozen other Icelanders, instead of signing in favor of an existing candidate, she filled out the wrong form and registered herself in the national vote by mistake, local media report.
Her relatives, many of whom contacted her upon discovering her name in the list, did not fail to tease her. “Some told me: ‘You should have told us if you wanted to run for office, we would have voted for you!'”, hilariously recounts this resident of Selfoss, a small town 45 minutes to the east from the capital Reyjavvick.
Other candidates inadvertently did not immediately know how to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. This is the case of Þorbjörg Friðriksdóttir, for example. This 68-year-old Icelander explains to BFMTV.com that she “panicked” when a journalist from public radio RUV called her to tell her that she was a presidential candidate.
“I told him: ‘But no! I’m not a candidate!’” she remembers.
“My first reaction was to wonder what I could have done to get there,” says the sixty-year-old, owner of lodges and travel organizer. “But actually, it’s a really stupid mistake. I must have checked the wrong box or written my name in the wrong place, it could have happened to anyone.”
“Madame President”
To her great amusement, Þorbjörg Friðriksdóttir was also contacted by a large number of her relatives intrigued by her approach, as well as by a number of curious journalists. Since then, she says her stepson calls her “Madame President.”
The president of the National Electoral Commission Ástríður Jóhannesdóttir, in charge of the website, said that changes had been made to clarify the online procedure, but that around 80 people were still in the running at the end of April for the presidential election.
Since then, around forty of them have managed to cancel their candidacy, as Þorbjörg Friðriksdóttir who requested from the electoral services that his name be removed from the list of candidates. Others like Alda Guðrún Jónasdóttir were not concerned about it but, unsurprisingly, they did not reach the threshold of 1,500 citizen sponsorships necessary to finally be eligible on June 1st. Even if a few friends gave him their support “for laughs”.
At the beginning of April, Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir – at the head of a left-right coalition and in office since 2017 – announced her resignation to run for president, alongside 10 other candidates according to the Iceland Review newspaper.
Jeanne Bulant Journalist BFMTV
