Saturday: 82.5 per cent of the register turns out and 52.84 per cent says no. Sunday: the foreign minister goes on air, calls the result clear, says it will be respected — and in the same discussion invites the leaders of the Centre Party and the Independence Party to be first sponsors of the Protocol 35 bill. Monday: it is confirmed that the primacy rule goes to the autumn parliament. Wednesday: the surveillance authority in Brussels is reported to be filing suit to make sure of it.
The bill is one sentence, and one sentence is enough. It provides that where an implemented EEA rule and an Icelandic statute conflict, the EEA rule wins — including against a statute Alþingi passes afterwards. An obligation entered into in 1994 would outrank the votes of every parliament elected after it. Stefán Már Stefánsson, professor emeritus, has made the constitutional objection plainly: Alþingi cannot enact superlaws, and cannot sign away by ordinary statute the power the constitution entrusted to it. The constitution permits such a transfer by amendment and by the consent of the nation. Neither exists.
A country allowed to choose whether it negotiates, but not whether its own parliament has the last word, has been asked the smaller of the two questions.
Nor is the Icelandic position recent shirking. The implementation written in 1993 was deliberate legal work drawn to the limits the constitution allows, and the European side accepted it when the agreement was made. It has run thirty-three years. What has changed is not Iceland's conduct but Brussels's patience with an arrangement it once signed. A case before the EFTA Court is a normal way of settling a disagreement under the agreement; it is not, by itself, proof that anyone has breached anything.
The tell is the timetable. The bill has been re-tabled every session since 2023 and would have come back whichever way the vote fell — record turnout, an unambiguous margin, and it does not move by a hair. Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson named it on the first working day after the count: “If the response to a no vote on giving up sovereignty is to submit Protocol 35, which means that laws drafted by officials in Brussels would take precedence over Icelandic laws, then the government is completely out of touch with reality and does not respect the outcome of the referendum.” Democracies are rarely overturned loudly. They are worn down quietly, when the last word leaves the chamber for institutions no Icelander voted for.
