The move comes after a flurry of visits by EU politicians to Iceland and by Icelandic politicians to Brussels.
If Icelanders vote yes, they could join the EU before any other candidate country, one of the people said.
“The conversation on enlargement is shifting,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, who met with Iceland’s Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir last month in Brussels, told POLITICO.
“It is increasingly about security, about belonging and about preserving our ability to act in a world of competing spheres of influence.
In March 2015, Reykjavík asked to no longer be considered an EU candidate country.
Von der Leyen, who visited Iceland last July, also met with Frostadóttir during a Nordic Council meeting in Stockholm last fall and praised her country for strengthening its cooperation with the EU.
The conversation around deepening ties with Iceland and potentially even resuming accession negotiations began even before Trump returned to office last year, with an EU official saying Brussels had already been paying more attention to the strategically important country. »