Taking the lead

Arni Arnason

“I always had that need in me to do a little bit more.” In 2024, Kristrún Frostadóttir ’16MA, pictured here in Snæfellsnes, Iceland, became her country’s youngest prime minister. View full image

In December 2024, 36-year-old Kristrún Frostadóttir ’16MA became the youngest prime minister ever to lead Iceland. She went into politics just four years ago after having trained at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, now the Yale Jackson School, and working as an economist. She has been a voice for a welfare state that balances its books, and she has called for free trade in the face of US tariffs. In April, she spoke with Veronique Greenwood ’08 about her trajectory. 

Veronique Greenwood: What were you interested in as a child?

Kristrún Frostadóttir: I was very interested in languages. I sought out all the opportunities I could have to go to summer camp abroad. I went to Danish camp abroad. I went to Spain for a couple of summers, where I lived in the Basque country with a Spanish family. I had a Canadian boyfriend that I met in Spain at the time, and I spent some time in Toronto when I was 17, 18 years old. I come from a very sort of normal, Icelandic background, but I always had, I guess, that need in me to do a little bit more. Then I ended up going to graduate studies in the US.

VG: Were you already trained in economics at that point?   

KF: I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Iceland. Then I initially went to the US to do a PhD in econ. I went to Boston University, and I started my PhD there, and after about a year, I realized I didn’t want to become an academic. I felt I was too closed off from the world. I wanted to tie econ more to policy, more to what was going on in the world. 

VG: So how did you end up at Yale?

KF: I wanted to do more policy work, and I ended up applying to a number of schools that had these policy departments. My husband [Einar Ingvarsson ’14MBA] had done his MBA at Yale. I had gotten to know the New Haven community, the Yale community. And I was also just very happy with the focus at Jackson. It was, at the time when I was there, a very fluid environment. You could come in with your own focus. That time I spent at Yale, it was such an intellectually inspiring time, but I obviously got to know a really great group of people, not just at Jackson, but at other schools, and it stayed with me ever since then.

VG: Were there any particularly special places for you in New Haven?

KF: Oh, I love the pizza. I know that’s not Yale-affiliated, but I’m a big pizza person, and I still have dreams of going to Modern Apizza. I was living on Bishop Street, so I got a coffee at Nica’s every morning. 

VG: Who are you still in touch with from that time?

KF: There were a bunch of people that came from the military, which was a very good experience for me. A lot of people came from West Point as well, and have been all over the world since then, and then obviously, people that went into the private sector, big international organizations as well. 

VG: You say that being exposed to people from the military was important. Can you tell me more about that?  

KF: Iceland doesn’t have a military. We’re a founding member of NATO, and we don’t have a military. So Icelanders’ connection with the armed forces is very, very limited, and it means that people tend to have a very limited understanding of why you would need a military to begin with, what type of people would join that institution, why you would need to be in a situation where you use arms instead of just being a peaceful world. We’ve always been a bearer of peace in the North Atlantic, and we are still going to be a country without a military. But I mean, if you just talk about the environment today, where we have obvious security threats in Europe, people are thinking maybe this isn’t a given thing. Maybe there’s a reason we have been living in a peaceful setting. There are other people who are guarding us. We have a bilateral defense agreement, for example, with the US. There are people who are tied to the US military that de facto are here to help us protect our nation. 

VG: Tell me about how you got to be where you are now, because that is quite the story.

KF: I never really imagined I would be in this situation. It’s easy for people to sort of see your lifespan and think maybe you were always heading there. I’m obviously still very young. I’m the youngest prime minister this country has ever had. I’m also the third woman who’s been in this position. 

When I graduated Yale, I got a job at Morgan Stanley in New York doing research. And I went to London for that same firm. Then I came to Iceland, and I quickly became chief economist of one of the investment banks here. And during Covid, that was the time where my profile was lifted. I mean, this is a very small country; there’s less than 400,000 people that live here. 

What happens is, you go abroad, you spend some time abroad, you come back, and all of a sudden, you know, you bring something new to the table. People haven’t seen your face in a while. You have a new voice. You might have a perspective that you’re bringing from the outside, and very quickly, if you have something new to say, people fetch you for the media. They fetch you for the radio. And in a couple of years, after I moved back home, I become a somewhat known commentator on economic affairs. 

I realized as that period sort of went by that maybe I wanted to do more sort of direct policy work than I was doing. And in a small community like Iceland, what ends up happening is that if you want to do direct policy, either you work for a lobbyist, which I did for six months and it wasn’t really my thing, or you go into government. I got the opportunity to run in 2021 for a seat in Parliament. 

And long story short, I got sort of the lead seat in that [Reykjavik South] constituency, and I ended up in Parliament. I felt there was room in Icelandic politics at the time to have a Social Democrat that still had an understanding of how you run the finances, how you run the budget, because there tended to be this discussion about people who are on the center left: that they only spend money, they can’t run a balanced budget, they can’t do things properly. In that election, the Social Democratic Alliance didn’t do very well, but a year after, there was an opening in the leadership and I ran. In fall of 2022 when I was six months pregnant, I became the leader of the Social Democratic Alliance. We won the election just before Christmas. 

VG: Why do you think you won?

KF: I’m obviously a very political person, but I’m also very policy oriented. I saw that the party needed structure. And I know what happened. It was similar to a lot of Europe, where the focus had been too much on maybe what people would say are sort of fringe issues, away from the core of social democracy, rather than being welfare, housing, good jobs, solid economic growth, the public health care system.

And so we ended up sort of restructuring, the focus going back to basics, old-school social democracy, like you would see in Western Europe after the Second World War, where the focus was more on unity. You know, we need to do this together. As a society, we need to step up. And this, I think, is the strongest antidote you can have to this polarizing situation where you have people on the extreme right, and then you have the left parties telling people who might be voting for them how they should feel, how they should think, and that they’re bad people. We sort of backed away from too much social media, went back to direct communication, less judgment, more trying to understand where people are coming from. And I think it’s worked.

VG: I mean, it sounds really refreshing.

KF: There’s a lot to say about trying to understand where people are coming from. It’s so easy in today’s environment to just sort of brand people as someone you can’t talk to, you can’t agree with, who have bad opinions or are bad people who don’t deserve their voice to be heard. A lot of the time, people are just in a bad place. They feel the system hasn’t served them, and a lot of the times, they’re right, and instead of telling them off, you need to understand where they’re coming from, and a lot of the time you can get through to them. But it’s a tricky subject. And I mean, we see this in politics today, all over the world. It’s very easy to give people quick fixes and promises, but our solution has been to focus on fewer things, more core things that unite people. 

VG: What is it like being in a country that is so small? I mean, do people recognize you everywhere that you go? 

KF: Yes. Everyone knows who I am, and it’s a very quick change in my life, because I’ve only been in politics for four years, and I don’t come from a background where people are used to being in the news. My parents are very sort of normal, wonderful, extremely smart people that nobody knows who they are. I’m a very private person. I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old. You try to keep your life as normal as you can, but at the same time, it’s also just a small community. You’re in a public service role. People have an opinion on you. That’s all right.