Ahead of the referendum, the two sides held a televised debate where the Yes campaign team was headed by Prime Minister Kristr\u00fan Frostad\u00f3ttir and the No campaign was led by Gu\u00f0r\u00fan Hafsteinsd\u00f3ttir, chair of the opposition Independence Party.<\/p>\n
Kristr\u00fan told the audience that Iceland was already well integrated in the European Union, and becoming a member would be “one of the biggest risk-reducing steps we can take”. <\/p>\n
She also made clear that a Yes vote did not necessarily mean that Iceland would join, and that if there was a No vote, the result would be respected. <\/p>\n
Gu\u00f0r\u00fan, meanwhile, stressed that the vote was not about whether Iceland should work well with Europe: “We already do, and we want that to continue.”<\/p>\n
Instead, she portrayed the referendum as a vote on whether Icelanders wanted to hand “decision-making powers” to Brussels on fisheries, agriculture and their natural resources.<\/p>\n
Although geopolitics kick-started the government’s decision to push for a return to EU talks, there has been little discussion of it during the campaign.<\/p>\n
“It’s lower on the agenda than many would think,” says Hallgrimur Oddsson, director of EU-Iceland think-tank European Currents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of the referendum, the two sides held a televised debate where the Yes campaign team was headed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-753323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}