Iceland Counts Its Knife-Edge EU Vote Into the Night
Counting is under way in Iceland’s referendum on resuming EU accession talks, with no results published as polls closed at 23:00 — the final opinion poll put No narrowly ahead at 51.6 per cent, and an earlier survey had Yes in front. More than a fifth of voters cast ballots early. The result, expected in the early hours, decides only whether talks frozen since 2013 restart; membership itself would need a second referendum.
Somewhere in Reykjavík tonight, counting officials are settling a question that echoes far beyond four hundred thousand people: whether the era of European integration can start moving forward again, in however small a way, after a decade defined by departure. The margin will matter almost as much as the answer — a one-point Yes restarts talks under permanent protest from the fishing towns; a one-point No leaves a pro-EU government with a mandate problem and Brussels with a bruise. Either way, the campaign’s drivers — Russia, tariffs, a superpower’s designs on Greenland — do not vanish with the count. Watch the morning’s result and the fishing constituencies’ numbers; they will tell the whole story.