REYKJAVIK: Some 7,000 people demonstrated in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik on Sunday against the government’s decision to drop its bid for membership of the European Union, police said.
The protest staged by four opposition parties was the largest the island nation had seen since those of 2008-09 at the height of the financial crisis.
Iceland’s centre-right government withdrew its EU membership bid on Thursday, saying its interest were better served outside the bloc.
It took the decision without consulting parliament, which had voted in favour of the bid in 2009.
“Only the Althingi (parliament) can revoke that decision,” Arni Pall Arnason, head of the parliamentary group of the largest opposition party, the Social Democrats, said in a statement.
“The government does not dare to face either parliament or the public on this issue, but tries to trick the EU into accepting a change of Iceland’s status,” he added.
The opposition sent a letter to EU leaders on Friday asking that Iceland remain under consideration for accession negotiations, and a spokeswoman for the executive European Commission said the door remained open.
The government was elected on a Eurosceptic platform in 2013 but has since failed to muster a majority of MPs to support a withdrawal from the accession process, with some deputies calling for a referendum on the issue.
Meanwhile most Icelanders are opposed to EU membership, mainly because of resistance to the bloc’s fishing quotas.
Iceland first applied for EU membership under a leftist government in 2009, when the country was badly shaken by an economic crisis that saw the Icelandic krona lose almost half its value, making eurozone membership an attractive prospect.
But the thorny issue of fishing quotas was seen as a key obstacle to joining the bloc, and had not yet been broached by the time a first round of accession talks concluded in January 2013.
Eleven out of 33 negotiation chapters were concluded. -AFP