Iceland Votes to Keep EU Accession Talks Closed

Icelanders have voted against reopening membership negotiations with the European Union, rejecting a push by the center-left government to restart talks that were shelved more than a decade ago.

The referendum was held Saturday, and the national broadcaster RUV reported Sunday that 52.5% voted no while 47.5% backed the government's proposal. The count ran overnight, with ballots carried in from rural polling stations by plane, boat and car after voting closed at 10 p.m. local time. An early partial tally had pointed the other way, with the yes camp leading at 51.2% once roughly 87,000 of the country's 270,000 eligible voters had been counted, according to CNN.

The question put to voters was narrow. They were not asked whether Iceland should join the bloc, only whether the accession negotiations suspended in 2013 should resume. The vote was advisory, and any eventual membership agreement would have gone to a separate referendum before Iceland could join.

Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir's coalition had framed the vote as a now or never moment. It argued that renewed talks would help the country of just under 400,000 people manage inflation, high interest rates and mounting pressure over Arctic security, and supporters said membership could ease the cost of living.

The no campaign turned the debate toward the sea. Opposition leader Gudrun Hafsteinsdottir, who led it, said Iceland's economic problems were for Icelandic politicians to solve rather than for Brussels, and opponents warned that the bloc's Common Fisheries Policy would put the country's most important industry at risk, Al Jazeera reported.

Iceland first applied to join the EU in 2009, in the wreckage of a banking collapse that pushed its economy to the edge. A eurosceptic government abandoned the talks in 2013 after four years of negotiations, and every administration since has insisted that any restart be approved by voters first, Reuters reported.

Parliament is not legally bound by the result, though the governing coalition had said it would treat the outcome as a mandate. The vote closes the question at a moment when the war in Ukraine and competition over the Arctic have made Iceland's position in the North Atlantic more strategically sensitive than it has been in decades.