Icelanders narrowly turned down reopening membership talks with the European Union in a divisive referendum, as concerns over retaining control of the island nation’s natural resources eclipsed the case for closer alignment with Europe.
After a night of see-saw tally, the “no” camp scored 52.8% support against 47.2% for the “yes” side when all ballots were counted, a somewhat larger victory than projected by polls in the run-up to the vote, according to the final results presented by the electoral commission on August 30.
For the EU, the result dealt a symbolic setback to efforts to revive interest in enlargement just as it’s seeking to kick the process out of a 13-year hiatus.
Iceland’s coalition government plans to respect the result of the referendum, Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir told reporters in Reykjavik on August 30.
“We will not continue negotiations during this government’s term,” she said. “Something big has to change in the next 24 months for this to be at the top of the agenda.”
The outcome follows a campaign by the opponents that fanned fears over eroding the sovereignty of the north Atlantic nation of 400,000 and diluting its authority over the key fishing and agriculture sectors. The “yes” side focused on the potential boost to trade and prospects of lower cost pressure, as well as of an eventual economic anchor via the common currency, although membership in the European Economic Area already grants Iceland access to the EU’s single market.
The result shows “people are happy with the EEA agreement and happy with the current relationship with the EU,” Frostadóttir said.
European Council President Antonio Costa told Frostadóttir that “the EU fully respects the democratic choice of the Icelandic people and that Iceland remains one of the EU’s closest and most trusted partners, including through the EEA,” according to a message relayed by his spokesperson.
For the island fishing nation, control over marine resources was a key issue. It remains one of Iceland’s main economic pillars along with tourism, aluminum smelting and innovation, accounting for about a third of goods exports. Measured by catch size, Iceland would have become the EU’s biggest fishing nation, by a large margin.
“This has made a lot of people see how important fisheries are for us,” Frostadóttir said. “The EU as such was not the goal, but the goal was further economic stability and living standard for Iceland.”
Both campaigns resorted to exaggerations and propaganda to win over voters, said Eva Heida Önnudóttir, professor of political science at the University of Iceland. The “no” camp stood out with “clearly false” statements during the campaign, she said.
One fearmongering claim by the opponents warned that a subsea power cable would link Iceland to the grid on mainland Europe, leading to higher power prices and increased pressure to harvest Icelandic nature to meet Europe’s energy demand. No such decision can be taken unilaterally.
Lack of campaign funding transparency legislation likely played a part, Önnudóttir said, leaving voters in the dark about who was paying for ads and activities.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen said the vote showed that EU membership was not inevitable for European democracies, pushing back against calls for more federalism and more powers for the European Commission, according to a post on X.
“The biggest thing that has changed is the symbolism here,” James Batchik, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, said by phone. “It would’ve been really a strong message had a rich Nordic country said: ‘we want to join the EU and expand our relationship with the EU’ as a way to augment what the EU is trying to say — that its pull factor is of stability, economic power, ability to withstand external threats.”
Turnout was 82.6%, the highest since the 2009 general election.
“The referendum is a victory for democracy,” Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir said.
With Iceland, the commission wanted to send a positive signal and build momentum for a broader push to bring in countries including Montenegro, Ukraine and Moldova.
It’s also been more than three decades since the EU brought in a country that became a net contributor upon entry. Iceland, which won independence from Denmark in 1944, is among the world’s richest countries per capita.
The Nordic nation previously negotiated with the bloc from 2009 to 2013 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, after its economy had crashed in 2008 following the collapse of its over-indebted banks. The aftershocks reverberated for years through capital controls. The issue was revived by Frostadóttir’s coalition when it took power in December 2024.
In Iceland, campaigns mostly focused on topics other than security and geopolitics, even as Russia wages war in Europe for the fifth year, and U.S. President Donald Trump covets neighboring Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland and Iceland hold key strategic positions in the North Atlantic, just as great power rivalry in the Arctic is intensifying.
“When you look at what the mobilizing factors were for the people of Iceland, security wasn’t exactly high on that list,” Batchik at the Atlantic Council said. But the government likely brought forward the vote as “Iceland’s concerned about what implications it might set if the United States is no longer a reliable security actor making claims on neighboring territories,” he said.
Iceland, which has never had an army of its own, has staked its protections on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that’s now weakening. The U.S. military withdrew from the Keflavik air base in southwest Iceland in 2006.
