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.