Aug. 30 (UPI) — Icelandic voters rejected restarting talks about the Nordic island nation joining the European Union.
Referendum results announced Sunday showed that 53% of people voted against the talks while 47% said yes. Overall, 68,135 were cast with 82.4% voter turnout.
Iceland had discussed joining the bloc in 2013 shortly after a banking collapse in the country and the global economic crisis. Talks ended because Icelanders were concerned about keeping sovereign control over fisheries, the country’s top export.
Iceland would not have become an EU member automatically if voters had approved the talks. The country’s representatives would have had to negotiate with Brussels, and Icelandic voters would have had to approve EU membership in a second referendum.
“This is a good day,” Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir said Saturday. “We have now reached the point where this is in the hands of the nation. Either we enter these negotiations, seek a good agreement and then see what happens, or we put the discussion about the European Union aside, at least for the time being.”
Frostadóttir last month said on the British podcast, The Rest is Politics, that Iceland currently follows 75% of EU rules.
“Joining it is not going to sink the country and joining it is also not fundamentally going to change every aspect of Icelandic, you know, economy,” she said at the time.
However, there was concern that the other 27 countries in the EU would drown out Iceland and the country would have to change its currency to the euro from the króna.