Between 300 and 400 people gathered in Austurvöllur square, outside Alþingi, Iceland’s parliament, in Reykjavík yesterday evening to protest the government’s handling of the country’s application for entry to the European Union, Morgunblaðið reports.
The protest, the second in as many days—8,000 people protested on Sunday—follows the sending of a letter by the Icelandic government to the EU withdrawing Iceland as an applicant country for membership. The coalition government of the Independence Party and the Progressive Party bypassed Alþingi when a decision was made to ask the EU not to consider Iceland as an application country for membership.
As reported yesterday, the opposition reasons that the government has “no legal authority” for unilaterally terminating EU talks and that the resolution passed by Alþingi on July 16, 2009, mandating the government to apply for membership of the EU is still in force.
