Iceland looks to fast-track vote on joining EU

BRUSSELS — Iceland is weighing a vote on restarting EU membership talks as early as August, according to two people familiar with the country’s accession preparations.

It comes as momentum for EU enlargement appears to be growing, with Brussels working on a plan that could give Ukraine partial membership in the bloc as early as next year, and with accession front-runner Montenegro closing another negotiating chapter last month.

Reykjavík’s governing coalition had promised to hold a referendum on restarting EU accession talks by 2027, after a previous government froze negotiations in 2013. But the timeline is being sped up at a time of geopolitical upheaval and following a decision by Washington to impose tariffs on Iceland and threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to annex Greenland.

The Icelandic parliament is expected to announce the date of the ballot within the next few weeks, according to the two people who were granted anonymity to speak freely. The move comes after a flurry of visits by EU politicians to Iceland and by Icelandic politicians to Brussels. If Icelanders vote yes, they could join the EU before any other candidate country, one of the people said.

“The conversation on enlargement is shifting,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, who met with Iceland’s Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir last month in Brussels, told POLITICO. “It is increasingly about security, about belonging and about preserving our ability to act in a world of competing spheres of influence. This concerns all Europeans.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir in Brussels last month and said their partnership “offers stability and predictability in a volatile world.”

Von der Leyen, who visited Iceland last July, also met with Frostadóttir during a Nordic Council meeting in Stockholm last fall and praised her country for strengthening its cooperation with the EU. Von der Leyen is set to visit the Arctic region again in March.

The conversation around deepening ties with Iceland and potentially even resuming accession negotiations began even before Trump returned to office last year, with an EU official saying Brussels had already been paying more attention to the strategically important country.

But escalating threats from the U.S., among them a joke by Billy Long, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Iceland, that the country would become the 52nd U.S. state and that he would be governor, have increased the urgency.

“I think Iceland being mentioned four times in a Trump speech [at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month while the U.S. president was talking about Greenland] has certainly focused minds,” said another EU official familiar with the situation, adding that it “must be unsettling for a small country.”

Iceland applied to join the EU in 2009 at the peak of a financial crisis in which all three of its major commercial banks collapsed. But the government froze the talks in December 2013, with Iceland’s economy rapidly recovering at the same time as economists warned of a potential eurozone collapse. In March 2015 Reykjavík asked that it no longer be considered an EU candidate country.

But the geopolitical situation has changed significantly over the past decade.

Iceland occupies a strategically important location in the North Atlantic just south of the Arctic Circle, does not have an army, and relies on its membership in NATO and a 1951 bilateral defense agreement with the U.S. for its security.

That reality, along with the economic benefits of joining the EU, seems to be warming public attitudes about potentially joining the bloc, with polling showing support on the rise.

Still, its path to EU membership isn’t straightforward. The accession process might hit some political roadblocks, Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, a former president of Iceland, told POLITICO.

The biggest potential stumbling block is over fishing rights, a key industry in Iceland and a big issue during negotiations the last time around.

“In the end it comes down to fish, that was always the issue,” the first EU official said.

But there’s one key difference between negotiations back then and now: Brexit.

The U.K. and Iceland have long had a fraught relationship over fishing, engaging in a series of violent clashes dubbed the Cod Wars between the 1950s and the 1970s. During Iceland’s accession negotiations there were serious tensions between the two countries, with the U.K. taking issue with the quantity of mackerel that Icelandic fishing vessels were catching. The dispute, dubbed the “Mackerel War,” saw the EU threaten trade sanctions on Iceland.

But with Britain now out of the EU, fishing rights could be less of a barrier.

If Icelanders do decide they wish to resume talks with the EU, negotiations could move quickly. Iceland is a member of the European Economic Area and part of the Schengen free travel area, and as such already has many of the EU’s laws on its books.

Before the freezing of talks back in 2013, Iceland had closed 11 of its negotiating chapters out of 33. Montenegro, the most advanced EU candidate country, only surpassed that milestone in the last few months.

“On paper, it would not be too difficult; it could even take just a year” to close all negotiating chapters, said the first EU official. A person familiar with the mood in Iceland, however, cautioned that such a timeline would be overly ambitious given the difficulty of some elements of the negotiations.

To actually join the EU, Iceland would also have to hold another referendum on whether to proceed after concluding talks.

Depending on how long that takes and the geopolitical situation at the time, it could be a high bar to clear, with the benefits of membership for Iceland more about security and less about economic reward. Iceland has the world’s fifth-highest GDP per capita, making EU membership less of a draw than for others that are clamoring to join the bloc.

Nicholas Vinocur and Sebastian Starcevic contributed to this report.