National Preservation Party () was a

political party A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or p ...

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

History

The party was founded on 15 March 1953 by members of the

Progressive Party Progressive Party may refer to: Active parties * Progressive Party, Brazil * Progressive Party (Chile) * Progressive Party of Working People, Cyprus * Dominica Progressive Party * Progressive Party (Iceland) * Progressive Party (Sardinia), Ita ...

Social Democratic Party The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology. Active parties Fo ...

and

Socialist Party Socialist Party is the name of many different political parties around the world. All of these parties claim to uphold some form of socialism, though they may have very different interpretations of what "socialism" means. Statistically, most of t ...

.Vincent E McHale (1983) ''Political parties of Europe'', Greenwood Press, p523 It won two seats in the June 1953 elections, taken by Gils Guðmundsson and

Bergur Sigurbjörnsson Bergur Sigurbjörnsson (20 May 1917 – 28 July 2005) was an Icelandic magazine editor and politician. He studied business in the University of Iceland, and later went on to study economics in Stockholm University. He founded the weekly magaz ...

. Party members also gained seats on the student council of the

University of Iceland The University of Iceland ( is, Háskóli Íslands ) is a public research university in Reykjavík, Iceland and the country's oldest and largest institution of higher education. Founded in 1911, it has grown steadily from a small civil servants' s ...

Akureyri Akureyri (, locally ) is a town in northern Iceland. It is Iceland's fifth-largest municipality, after Reykjavík, Hafnarfjörður, Reykjanesbær and Kópavogur, and the largest town outside Iceland's more populated southwest corner. Nickn ...

local council and

Reykjavík Reykjavík ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Iceland. It is located in southwestern Iceland, on the southern shore of Faxaflói bay. Its latitude is 64°08' N, making it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. With a po ...

city council. However, it lost both

Althing The Alþingi (''general meeting'' in Icelandic, , anglicised as ' or ') is the supreme national parliament of Iceland. It is one of the oldest surviving parliaments in the world. The Althing was founded in 930 at (" thing fields" or "assemb ...

seats in the 1956 elections. It failed to win a seat in the

June June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is the second of four months to have a length of 30 days, and the third of five months to have a length of less than 31 days. June contains the summer solstice in ...

and

October October is the tenth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the sixth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. The eighth month in the old calendar of Romulus , October retained its name (from Latin and Greek ''ôc ...

elections in 1959, and thereafter only contested elections as part of the People's Alliance. Guðmundsson gained a seat, which he held until 1979. Sigurbjörnsson did not succeed in winning back his seat, but served twice in the Althing during the 1963-1967 term, replacing other MPs. In 1970 some party members left the People's Alliance to establish the

Union of Liberals and Leftists The Union of Liberals and Leftists () was a social-liberal political party in Iceland. History The party was established in 1970 by dissidents from the People's Alliance who had formerly been members of the National Preservation Party.Vincen ...

Ideology

The party's main policy was a neutral foreign policy. It opposed Icelandic membership of

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

and the presence of American military bases in the country. Domestically, it had a liberal, social-democratic platform, supporting a mixed economy with both private and public participation.

Election results

References

{{Authority control Defunct political parties in Iceland 1953 establishments in Iceland Political parties established in 1953 Political parties with year of disestablishment missing