With President Donald Trump aggressively setting his sights on acquiring Greenland and growing calls in the territory for independence from Denmark, the future status of the Arctic island was firmly at the front of voters' minds as they headed to the polls Tuesday.
Just 31 lawmakers will be elected to Greenland’s parliament or Inatsisartut, but the vote, which has drawn little attention in previous years, will be watched the world over.
“It’s definitely a different election this time around,” said Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, which provides training, research and advice to Denmark’s military.
Politicians in Greenland had previously talked about independence from Denmark as “a goal for future generations,” he told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday.
"Trump’s interest has made it really tangible” because voters can see what independence looks like, he said. This could be close collaboration or “perhaps even annexation by the U.S.” and could happen in a few years, he added.
While Greenland is the world’s largest island, it is also one of the most sparsely populated, home to just more than 56,000 people.
Controlled by Denmark for almost 300 years, it became a formal territory of the country in 1953 before gaining home rule in 1979, though Copenhagen still controls its foreign and defense policy. It also contributes just under $1 billion to Greenland's economy.
Denmark has nonetheless benefited from the arrangement too, according to Dwayne Menezes, managing director of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative, a London-based think tank. Menezes said it had “profited enormously from Greenland over the decades, not just in terms of significant economic gains, but also the geopolitical advantage it has enjoyed globally as a result.”
Still, Trump has repeatedly stated an interest in acquiring the island, which is technically part of North America and two-thirds of which sits above the rapidly melting Arctic Circle, where deposits of rare-earth minerals and potential offshore oil and natural gas remain largely untapped, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Having broached the issue in his first term and on multiple occasions after his return to the White House in January, in last week's lengthy speech to Congress, Trump said the United States would acquire Greenland, which is already home to an American military base, “one way or the other.”
However, his overtures have been repeatedly rebuffed by both lawmakers in Greenland and Danish politicians.
Greenlanders “deserve to be treated with respect, and I don’t think the U.S. president has done that recently since he took office,” Prime Minister Mute Egede told the Danish public broadcaster, DR, on Monday.
Egede, whose Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) party favors a gradual transition to autonomy, added that he thought Trump’s actions meant “people don’t want to get as close to (the U.S.) as they might have wanted in the past.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has also repeatedly ruled out transferring the territory to the U.S.
Greenland's citizens also seemed less than enamored with the idea. A recent poll commissioned by the Danish newspaper Berlingske and Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq found that 85% of respondents did not wish to become a part of the U.S., with nearly half seeing Trump’s interest as a threat.
In a pre-emptive move to curb U.S. interference, Greenland’s parliament last month passed a new law banning foreign contributions to political parties.
However, some parties, like the left-wing Naleraq and the center-right Demokraatit party, have campaigned for a quick transition to full independence, along with a defense agreement with Washington that would see the island get U.S. support without becoming an American territory.
Others, like the social democratic Siumut party, which has dominated the country’s politics and previously shared power with Egede's IA, have previously called for an independence referendum before backtracking.
Ahead of the results which are expected during the early hours of Wednesday, “the big question is whether they see this as staying status quo within the Kingdom of Denmark, or perhaps with slightly more autonomy, or the other option of having a very close relationship with the U.S.,” said Rahbek-Clemmensen from the Royal Danish Defence College.
“It’s also very obvious that the choice has to be made right now,” he added.
