COPENHAGEN: Danes voted Tuesday in a general election, where Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is seen as the favourite after standing up to US President Donald Trump over Greenland.
Frederiksen, a Social Democrat who has been in office since 2019, has been praised for her leadership after fending off Trump’s repeated demands to annex Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory he claims the United States needs for national security reasons.
“We stand firm when the winds blow. And it has been blowing around our kingdom,” she wrote on Instagram, as she spent part of the day in Aalborg, her electoral stronghold in the country’s northwest, with Greenlanders living in Denmark.
The latest polls give the left-wing bloc, for which Frederiksen is the self-proclaimed candidate, a nine-seat lead over the right-wing bloc, but neither side is projected to win a majority of the 179 seats in Denmark’s parliament, the Folketing.
“People may not really like her, but they see her as the right leader,” Elisabet Svane, political analyst at Danish newspaper Politiken, told AFP.
Frederiksen, who had “a prime minister you can count on” as one of her campaign slogans, “is a unifying figure in a world full of insecurity, and Danes are quite anxious -- there’s Greenland, Ukraine, (and mystery) drones” that flew over the Scandinavian country last year, Svane said.
The four overseas seats held by Denmark’s two autonomous territories -- two for Greenland and two for the Faroe Islands -- could tip the balance if the election result is very close.
More than 3,000 kilometres away, in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, voters were lining up to cast their ballots as soon as polling stations opened.
- ‘Serious situation’ -
The campaign has generated more interest than usual in the vast Arctic territory, with more than 20 candidates in the running for the two seats.
“I think it’s the most important election for the Danish parliament in Greenland in history,” Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told AFP in Nuuk.
“We are in a time where we have a superpower trying to acquire us, take us, control us,” he added, stressing that the territory still found itself in a “serious situation”.
“I think the most important thing that all the parties in Greenland have agreed on is that we need to work together, whoever gets elected for the parliament,” he said.
But Greenlandic voter Lars did not share the view that Greenland’s parties stood more united, saying he kept seeing divisions play out on social media.
“Everybody is fighting. Greenlanders are fighting. It’s terrible,” the lawyer told AFP.
Greenland’s main political parties all want independence from Denmark, but differ on the pace of the separation.
The centrist Moderate party, led by Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a two-time former prime minister, could end up kingmaker.
