SPIKED
Why we said Nei to the EU
Iceland’s former prime minister explains why his country is so committed to national sovereignty.
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Icelanders have given their verdict on joining the European Union. In a referendum on resuming accession talks with Brussels, 53 per cent voted No.
It is a telling moment. A small population was faced with a vitally important choice between national sovereignty and joining a huge bloc of nations overseen by the world’s most formidable bureaucracy. And it voted for national sovereignty.
The referendum was declared in March this year. The leaders of Iceland’s governing coalition parties – the Social Democratic Alliance, the Reform Party and the People’s Party – held an unexpected Friday press conference to announce that parliament’s schedule on Monday had been cleared. Only one thing would be on the agenda – a proposal for a referendum on whether to complete accession talks with the EU. The referendum was to be held in late August this year, after the summer, when Icelandic voters usually want a break from political bickering.
This came as a complete surprise to anyone who had not read a few reports that had been appearing in foreign media. These claimed that Icelandic officials had already informed Brussels that they would be seeking a referendum on restarting talks on EU membership. In fact, it seemed as though discussions on possible membership were already ongoing.
During the election campaign of late 2024, Kristrún Frostadóttir, the soon-to-be prime minister and leader of the pro-EU Social Democrats, had been adamant that the EU issue was off the table for the time being. She argued that Iceland should focus on resolving its own problems (inflation and rising interest rates), rather than divide the nation on the EU question. Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, the current foreign minister and leader of Reform, had spent the election campaign avoiding answering questions on the EU, and the third party in government, the People’s Party, had been vehemently against anything to do with EU membership.
Yet, during the first few months of 2025, the EU question dominated Icelandic politics, even though a majority of MPs opposed membership. The government had a plan on how to win over enough MPs and voters to gain approval for accession talks. It insisted that a referendum would not ask voters their view on EU membership. Rather it would just be a question of whether Iceland should resume accession talks. They painted it as a chance to see what the EU might offer us – a peek into the Brussels gift box – with any final decision on membership put off until a future date.
In addition, ministers pointed to the geopolitical instability caused by Donald Trump’s presidency and Russia. We were told we were living in an uncertain world where our neighbours in Greenland were under threat from the US and that we could no longer rely entirely on NATO for our defence.
The government was appealing to people’s fears and their natural curiosity. It was asking them not to be so unkind as to deprive others of seeing what was on offer from the EU. I am sure Gunnarsdóttir, the foreign minister, must have put things quite differently in her many meetings with officials in Brussels in the run-up to the parliamentary proposal in March this year. In any case, the government managed to arrange a great many visits and interventions from EU representatives, who smiled and told Icelanders that they would be welcomed should they vote Yes in the referendum.
Incredibly, the Icelandic governing class has tried all this before in an effort to bring Iceland into the warm embrace of Brussels. In 2009, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, and just after I had entered politics leading the opposition Progressive Party, the then government applied for EU membership. We were told we needed to have more options for getting out of the crisis. Then, as now, there was no majority support for EU membership in parliament. We were told the application (which was not preceded by a referendum) was only to see what the EU might have to offer.
For years we had meetings with EU officials who were flabbergasted when they heard about Iceland’s approach to the process. And predictably, this course came to a dead end. But that was only after a few years of the government and the Icelandic establishment spending much of their time (and all their political capital) trying to adapt to the demands of the EU’s bureaucracy.
In 2015, two years after becoming prime minister of a coalition government, I informed the EU that Iceland was formally withdrawing its membership application. My government decided that Iceland should no longer be considered an applicant country in any capacity.
This resulted in some outrage from Iceland’s most ardent Europhiles, but before long, they started claiming that the application had not been withdrawn completely. After all, Iceland was still shown as an applicant country on EU websites. To set things straight, I wrote a new letter affirming our intentions, and off I went to Brussels to meet personally with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council president Donald Tusk. I explained that we had withdrawn our application and expected the EU to recognise that. I also reaffirmed that we looked on the EU as a friend and ally and would like to continue our mutually beneficial cooperation – after all, Iceland has long been a member of the European Economic Area and has access to the EU Single Market. Juncker and Tusk got the message, and that was that.
We proceeded to use our sovereignty to restore the economy, and Iceland enjoyed an extraordinarily fast and extensive turnaround in its fortunes. There is no doubt that the measures we used were available to us only because we were not bound by EU membership. We were free to make our own decisions based on our circumstances and needs. In fact, we had some serious skirmishes with the EU at the time, but sovereignty served us well. In the years since 2013, Iceland has enjoyed near-constant growth in GDP and purchasing power while the EU has struggled.
The current government was voted into power in December 2024 largely on a platform of tackling inflation and rising interest rates (mainly resulting from ever-increasing public expenditure). Unable to solve these problems and facing internal difficulties, the government looked for a way out.
And from early 2025 onwards, it was always looking towards the EU for answers. By the beginning of this year, EU membership appeared to our governing class as the only solution to our struggles. After the announcement of the referendum, ministers claimed that the EU might offer us lower interest rates and economic stability. We were told how much cheaper a cup of coffee is in Hungary than in Iceland (without considering that wages in Iceland are many times higher). We heard a lot about the price of pizza, hamburgers and chicken wraps, the great variety of cheeses available in France and the possibility that the EU might fund various infrastructure projects.
Most of the Icelandic establishment, the mainstream media and academia are pro-EU, and we certainly felt that during the referendum campaign. The ‘debate’ was hopelessly one-sided. The fact that Iceland would be a net contributor to EU projects or that any offer the EU made to Iceland would have to be ratified by all EU member states was conveniently overlooked. The discussion of fisheries was limited to the possibility of the EU exempting Iceland from future treaties – so as to allow Iceland to continue to control a little bit of what it currently has full control over.
Those on the left advocating for membership assumed that no one would care about the fisheries because of their dislike of the fisheries ‘barons’. That may be true, but EU membership would probably have benefitted the owners of fisheries companies. They would likely have sold their companies, along with the quotas, to European fishing companies. EU membership would instead have hit the companies’ employees (whose salaries are currently three times higher than their counterparts in the EU). And the towns that rely on the fishing industry would have suffered.
Throughout the referendum campaign, ministers continued to warn that foreign interests might try to influence the vote. There was talk of the Russians, the international far right and even the Americans. The only foreign entity that did not worry the government was the very one that had, in 2010, stated that it would try to influence public opinion on potential membership: the EU itself.
The EU certainly played its part in this referendum campaign, offering a string of meetings with Icelandic ministers and encouraging words in press conferences. As well it would, given the prospect of a prosperous Nordic country joining its club. Brussels had also solved the question of how Iceland could ‘continue’ accession talks when we were no longer an applicant country. It did so by stating that it would consider the withdrawn application ‘valid’.
Working with the No campaign, I met and campaigned with an enormous number of people from all walks of life: socialists, left greens, centrists, conservatives and libertarians, along with a great number of people with little interest in party politics. None of them was being paid by special-interest groups. All were volunteers who believed in a cause – a cause that made friends out of lifelong adversaries.
Perhaps the most surprising thing for the pro-EU side was the fact that young voters overwhelmingly voted No. Young people clearly want to have the same chance as their elders to make the most of their nation’s independence. They are also weary of the EU’s trajectory towards censorship, both on the internet and in private conversations.
In the end, the referendum did not turn on fisheries, foreign interference, xenophobia or fear of the unknown. Icelanders simply professed their continued faith in national sovereignty. They want to be free to govern themselves. They want to continue working with the EU through the mutually beneficial EEA free-trade agreement, but they also want to cooperate and trade with the rest of the world.
Some on the pro-EU side have responded to the result by turning on voters. We have already heard theories of how the ‘gullible plebs’ were led astray by so-called puppet masters. One advocate for the Yes group stated that it was now confirmed that Icelanders are stupid.
What’s worse is that ministers are already telling Icelanders that we must atone for the No vote by implementing more EU regulations, as part of the EEA agreement. These are the same people who talked of respecting ‘the will of the people’ when they thought they might win the referendum. Now they’ve lost, they’ve turned on the self-same ‘will of the people’.
When Icelanders fought for independence from Denmark over a century ago, we were one of the smallest and poorest nations in Europe. Yet we believed that we should be independent and able to take responsibility for our own destiny. The world was not – and never has been – a safe and predictable place. But we took the chance. Since then, we have met many challenges, but we survived and prospered. We will now continue on that sovereign path. We will take the bad with the good – and we will do so on our terms.
David Gunnlaugsson is a former prime minister of Iceland.
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