Greenland’s Elections This Month Weren’t About Trump. They Were Mostly About Fish.

The Greenlandic trawler the BINGO III fishes for shrimp and prawns off Disko Island. Gordon Leggett/Wikimedia Commons

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This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.

More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.

The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect. But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.

That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island. “With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me.

That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party—whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise—appealing to voters.

In its manifesto, the center-right party—known as the Democrats—said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”

“The sad truth is that the new fisheries law will harm the earnings of individual fishermen overall, while the economy will also deteriorate,” the document reads. “This means that there will be less money to improve the healthcare system. Less money to raise the level of primary schools. Less money to ensure better daycare institutions. Less money for the elderly. Less money for sports. In short; less money to run the country in the best possible way.”

The Democrats gained seven seats in Greenland’s single-chamber legislature, the Inatsisartut, seizing roughly one-third of the 31-seat parliament.

Keldsen said the party won a clear mandate to reform the fisheries law. What the new government does besides that depends largely on which party the Democrats form a coalition with.

The centrist party Naleraq, which is more pro-American and advocates the fastest-possible pathway to independence from Denmark, doubled its share of the parliament to eight seats, vaulting the party into second place.

“If you look at the Democrats, they focused on things that are important to people—housing, health care, education and growing the economy,” said Mads Qvist Frederiksen, the executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, a regional business group that includes Greenlandic industry.

“Independence from Denmark and Donald Trump did not take up a lot of the campaign,” he told me by phone. “But for Naleraq, it did.”

The party managed to secure most of the votes in the less populous northern reaches of Greenland, where its populist message played better than in the more populous, cosmopolitan and industrialized south. Given its strength in the new parliament, it’s a natural opposition party.

That makes an alliance between the Democrats and the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which controlled the outgoing government, more likely. Another potential coalition partner may be the pro-Denmark Atassut party, which came in fifth place.

But Keldsen warned that the Democrats are “fairly open” to “all scenarios.”

“If you take the Naleraq situation, they’re more aligned on business, but they stand far from each other on sovereignty,” he said. “With the IA, they’re very close on sovereignty, but very far apart on business.”

Siumut—a center-left party that held the junior role in the outgoing governing coalition—fell from second to fourth place this time, likely because once-loyal voters affected by the fisheries law jumped ship to the Democrats this time. That could make a tie-up with the Democrats harder.

The one thing uniting all parties: Opposition to becoming part of the United States.

In a joint statement issued on March 13, two days after the election, the heads of all five parties condemned Trump’s “repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland.”

“As party chairmen, we find this behavior unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance,” they wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. Survey data on public opinion in Greenland was scarce ahead of the election. But 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed joining the US in a poll taken in January, while just 56 percent backed independence.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.