Situations change, asking the same question a few years later is good, not bad. Especially since getting into the EU isn't BAM you're in, but a lengthy process with many exits along the route. I am convinced if a country doesn't want to be in the EU there are many off ramps to not actually be in the EU. And be it some last minute re-negotiation of fishery regulations.
For instance euro membership is a requirement for new entrants, but Sweden has been fudging the admission criteria just a teeny bit to ensure they do not meet the requirements and keep the krona (as opposed to Denmark, which got an opt-out before the euro became mandatory).
I would be curious to know the age distribution in yesterday's Iceland vote.
In the case of Brexit, the brexiters were mostly old people and the bremainers mostly young; for this reason, the forces of demography are slowly pushing the UK back in the EU's orbit again (looking at the polls). Wondering if the same could apply to Iceland.
It might be seen as this ideologic thing, but I don't think it is to the degree many people believe. I have lived in Iceland. Most Icelanders are pretty open-minded and an astounding amount of them have lived abroad for at least a year.
However their island is somewhat reliant on import (e.g. if you need wood to build something, there is no really useful amount of wood growing there). That means export is really important. And that for many people means fishery.
I could imagine that many young people in Reykjavík have a different experience as many of them can earn a living selling online services internationally.
As a EU citizen I don't see this as a Brexit-like event, it is clear that our Icelandic friends are EU-friendly and aligned with many of our laws and regulations already. The fact that they don't want in does not change that there are existing deep ties to the continent.
Iceland's in a fairly different situation. It's already in the EEA; that is, it's subject to most EU law and gets most of the benefits, but gets to have its own rules around fish.
(This was an option for the UK, and is actually pretty much what a lot of the yes campaign was pushing, but is very much not where the UK ended up.)
There were plenty of calls for a confirmatory vote (aka "Peoples' Vote", as if people didn't vote the first time) after the Brexit result in 2016. This was averted because Johnson won the election in 2019 and thus had a mandate to trigger Article 50.
If Remain had won 52% to 48%, you can bet that no second confirmatory vote would have been suggested. Can you think of an example where the pro-EU side won but the result was so close that it was felt a a second vote was needed? That is my point.
EU treaties were voted against by referendum in Denmark (1992) and Ireland (2001 and 2008). There were second votes where the treaty was subsequently passed in all three cases.
How many of the elections you're referring to were contested, called illegitimate or had similar tactics used to effectively call for the same thing? Maybe you can show me that there are a bunch of examples without anything like this, but the way this tactic spread throughout the political right all over the globe in the last ~10 years makes the assumption quite reasonable IMO.
…the difference being that someone like Cummings at the time didn’t have the heft of the Establishment behind him. Anyone can “call” for anything, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The “Peoples Vote” or secondary confirmatory vote was favoured by a large group (perhaps a majority of) MPs, the people who have the power to pass laws.
The examples I gave in Denmark and Ireland were of real re-runs of ballots organised by the state where the outcome was changed. Beyond the treaties of Nice, Lisbon and Maastricht I could have also mentioned examples in France and the Netherlands where the pro-EU lobby had a second bite of the democratic cherry by being able to make amendments to treaty proposals before organising a second ballot relatively close to the first. This is not something that usually happens after a referendum, which is why people link the EU with “keep voting until you get the right answer”, which I personally think is profoundly anti-democratic.
