COPENHAGEN: Greenlanders head to the polls on Tuesday for local elections held under the shadow of US President Donald Trump's threat to annex the autonomous Danish territory.
Trump argues that the United States needs the vast Arctic island for its security and has refused to rule out the use of force to secure it.
“We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent,“ Trump said on Sunday in an interview with NBC News.
But the island’s new Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen shot back: “The United States will not get Greenland. We don’t belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”
Despite Greenland making international headlines, the council elections have been dominated by local issues like health, housing, tourism development and mining.
Yet Nielsen said last week he understood Greenlanders feeling “uneasy” over diplomatic tensions, ticking off US Vice President JD Vance for joining his wife Usha’s “private visit” to the island, which was then changed to a US military base there on Friday.
Vance used the occasion to criticise Denmark for not having “done a good job by the people of Greenland“.
Coming less than a month after March 11's general election, researcher Signe Ravn-Hojgaard said Tuesday's vote is “not about the future of Greenland, it's about school, (about) local issues”.
Social media key
“The municipality that (the capital) Nuuk is in, Sermersooq, is the world’s largest,“ and is bigger than Spain, said Ravn-Hojgaard, who runs the think-tank Digital Infrastruktur in Nuuk.
“So, of course, politicians campaign just in the town where they live and on social media,“ she told AFP.
Because of the sparse and spread out population, and “relatively little news coverage, social media is more important”, the researcher added.
While close-knit communities help limit the use of fake profiles, the reliance on social media can speed up the circulation of false or out-of-context information -- something highlighted by Danish intelligence services.
According to them, the general election saw a high level of disinformation on social networks.
“There were examples of statements by Greenlandic politicians or private individuals that were used out of context to promote or reinforce certain points of view,“ Denmark’s intelligence service PET said.
Ravn-Hojgaard noted that “in small interconnected societies” posts need only a few shares to be seen by virtually everyone.
No opinion polls have been conducted, but Nielsen's centre-right Democrats were the big winners in the national poll last month.
“It’s still going to be interesting to see whether the Democrats will be riding on that wave of surprise success,“ said Carina Ren, director of the Arctic programme at the University of Aalborg.
In 2021, almost 64 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote. Polling stations are open between 9:00 am and 8:00 pm local time (1000 and 2100 GMT).
