Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has been accused of exaggerating her party’s success in tackling refugee issues, article from Indicator reported yesterday. She posted a graph on her Facebook page aimed at showing that the Left Greens were the best group of refugees, but has since been widely criticized and accused of spreading fake news.
According to the graph, the percentage of approved applications for international protection was 10% in 2017 when Lefitst-Grænir took office, rising to 20%, then 33%, then 61% for the consecutive years.
Óskar Steinn Jónínuson Ómarsson, a member of the Samfylking, wrote a special article Indicator to address Katrín’s clearly misuse of statistics, saying: “There are three reasons for this change between years: fewer applications for protection from safe countries, an increase in applications from Venezuela and the consequences of the COVID epidemic.” Applications from so-called safe countries are generally not once taken into account, so that the decrease in applications from these countries immediately leads to an increase in the acceptance rate.
A large number of comments on Katrín’s post referred to the Egyptian family who are facing deportation after more than two years in Iceland and have since disappeared, Grapevine reports here.
Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, MP for Pírata, also commented on the post and wrote: “You know as well as I, Katrín, that many voters chose your party because they believed that you had sympathy and would not pull yourself behind the statistics already came to children of flesh and blood. Sorry, this post proves you the opposite. Þórhildur’s comment has so far received 302 likes – considerably more than Katrín’s original post.
This comes after Rósa Björk Brynjólfsdóttir, Member of Parliament for the Left-Green Party, resigned due to the government’s handling of the controversial deportation of the Egyptian family, which is reported by Grapevine here.
Source: The Nordic Page