Icelanders voted against resuming negotiations on joining the European Union, the country’s national broadcaster reported on Sunday, after an unusually divisive debate.
The “no” side received 52.8 percent of the vote, the broadcaster, RUV, said. Icelandic officials were expected to announce the official results later on Sunday.
RUV reported that more than 225,000 people in this Nordic nation of 400,000, or some 82.5 percent of eligible voters, cast ballots in the referendum on Saturday. RUV said it was the highest voter turnout in any Icelandic election since 2009.
The decision was a significant defeat for the 27-member European Union, which has been pitching itself as a progressive and pragmatic alliance in an increasingly uncertain world. If Iceland had eventually become a member state, the bloc would have been able to expand its presence in the Arctic and bring in a wealthy nation.
Previous talks about Iceland joining the European Union were put on ice in 2013. There was no immediate comment from the union.
Many complex issues for Icelanders were at play. In interviews before the referendum, many people who planned to vote “no” said they were worried that joining the bloc could threaten the country’s control of its valuable fishing industry, as well as its sovereignty on other issues.
Some people who planned to vote “yes” said they were worried about Iceland’s economy in general and wanted to see what the negotiations would bring. Inflation is high. So are interest rates. The country suffered years of economic hardship after the global financial crisis in the late 2000s. Some said that joining one of the world’s largest economies — and potentially adopting its currency, the euro — could be a savvy move for long-term stability.
Other potential “yes” voters saw the bloc as a stabilizing protector. Iceland belongs to NATO but is the only member without its own military.
Mostly, some voters said in interviews before the referendum, their decision came down to questions about how to keep Iceland prosperous, stable and safe in an increasingly unsettled world. And most voters appeared to have decided that the country should stay the course and keep going it alone.
“People are saying this is maybe the biggest debate we’ve had in many years, some say even since the foundation of the republic,” in 1944, Hjortur Gudmundsson, an expert on relations between Iceland and the European Union, said before the vote. He said he planned to vote “no.”
The results showed a sharp geographic divide. Voters in and around Reykjavik, the capital, favored restarting talks. But in the rural rest of the country, most Icelanders voted against it.
Icelanders were rattled this year by President Trump’s threats against Greenland, the country’s closest neighbor. He even confused Iceland with Greenland at a major speech. In the interviews before the referendum, some of the potential “yes” voters saw the bloc as a stabilizing protector.
Few Icelanders thought Mr. Trump would ever threaten them. But though Iceland belongs to NATO, it is the only member without its own military. And the erratic moves from Washington led some to worry about the strength of NATO, and made the European Union look like an attractive layer of backup.
Going it alone is central to many Icelanders’ sense of the nation’s identity. Iceland became independent in 1944. Then, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, it fended off the British in a series of disputes, known as the Cod Wars, and unilaterally extended its exclusive economic zone off its shores to 200 miles from 12.
Iceland spent the rest of the 20th century turning its poor, agrarian society into a well-educated and progressive tourism powerhouse. Much of that prosperity came from Iceland’s fishing industry, which is still a major part of its economy.
Andrea Gunnarsdottir, a food blogger in Reykjavik, the capital, voted against joining because, she said, “the European Union makes no sense for Iceland.”
Iceland’s economic interests, she said, align poorly with those of bigger countries in mainland Europe. “Iceland fought for independence,” said Ms. Gunnarsdottir, 36. “And we should keep it.”
Either way, even though this referendum was only about talks, the debate was heated.
In part, that’s because polls had consistently shown a near-even split in public opinion, so no one knew how the vote would go.
“It’s incredibly polarized,” Eirikur Bergmann, a politics professor at Bifrost University in Iceland, said before the vote. He planned to vote “yes” to the talks, he said. “We’ve never seen such a tight race.”
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