As Icelanders say no to resuming EU talks, what issues weighed in the election?

Iceland's vote has rejected restarting negotiations to join the EU in a referendum which pitted concerns about geopolitical stability against keeping control over the nation's prized fisheries. Opponents defeating the measure by a margin of 52.8% to 47.2%, the vote being held in the shadow of repeated threats by US President Donald Trump to take control of nearby Greenland. For more on this, I'm joined by our Europe editor Armin Georgian. Armin, is this a blow to the EU? I think it's a slight dent in the EU's image, Annette. So the EU likes to show that it has this power, this sort of soft power to attract new members and it's enlarged really in waves since 1957 and I think it was also hoping to have one of these set pieces where two countries join the EU at the same time. So this happened with Spain and Portugal, it happened with Romania and Bulgaria and there were hopes that Iceland and Montenegro would provide this kind of set piece in 2028 and join together. So all of that obviously now not going to happen and I think symbolism aside, the EU would also have liked to have an actual EU member state really in the very heart of that Arctic region which has become so important for the EU as it is for Russia, for the US, for Canada and so forth. Having said all of that Annette, the EU does have a lot of work to bring in the Balkan countries and Moldova and Ukraine so it's not going to be short of work on enlargement despite this result in Iceland. Why did they vote no? You've got some cultural factors, it was interesting to look at the electoral map, you've got the cities very much pro-EU, I mean Reykjavik solidly in the yes camp, very much like London was in the 2016 EU referendum and then the countryside much more Eurosceptic. So you've got this sense of where do people feel more or less European which is interesting. You mentioned fishing, that was a very tangible economic factor, there were concerns that joining the EU would have meant that fishing fleets from other EU countries could have had access to Icelandic waters and so Iceland would have had to sort of share this valuable resource with other EU member states. Remember also that because of climate change valuable fish species are moving north which is actually going to help Iceland in the unless it had to share that resource with other EU member states and more broadly I think there were concerns about national sovereignty. There was a realisation that the EU is probably going to have well over 30 members in the 2030s. Voting rules are going to have to be overhauled to make the EU work so things don't just grind to a halt. In that sort of situation how much power or voice would Iceland have with its population that is actually smaller than Malta? So these were some of the concerns. So at the end of the day defence was not a factor? I think it was definitely part of the debate, it just wasn't the overriding issue. But defence is an interesting thing Annette because Iceland although it's in NATO it doesn't have a standing army which seems a bit astonishing in an era where Iceland now has to rely on Donald Trump's America for its security and on a 1951 defence agreement with the US which by the way Greenland also has a defence agreement dating back to the same year with the US 1951. So you've got this combination of Iceland not having a standing army relying on Donald Trump being the most important leader of a NATO country and thirdly increased Russian interest in the Arctic, more submarine activity around Iceland and so on. So I think this conversation on defence is very much going to continue. Maybe not to the point of actually creating a standing army because that would be a huge cultural leap in Iceland but certainly something is going to have to change and probably will be in the way Iceland will have to develop a lot more capacities like radar surveillance, submarine surveillance, maritime infrastructure, all of those things to become an even more valuable asset in NATO.