Greenland’s election winners push back against Trump’s wish to take control of the island

Greenland's new Prime Minister rejects Trump's control, focuses on independence, healthcare, education, and forming a coalition government.

Greenland’s likely new Prime Minister on Wednesday (March 12, 2025) rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to take control of the island, saying Greenlanders must be allowed to decide their own future as it moves toward independence from Denmark.

Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s Demokraatit, a pro-business party that favours a slow path to independence, won a surprise victory in Tuesday’s (March 11, 2025) parliamentary election, outpacing the two left-leaning parties that formed the last government. With most Greenlanders opposing Mr. Trump’s overtures, the campaign focused more on issues like healthcare and education than on geopolitics.

But on Wednesday (March 11) Mr. Nielsen was quick to push back against Mr. Trump, who last week told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. needed Greenland to protect its own national security interests and he expected to get it “one way or the other.”

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders, and we want our own independence in the future,” Mr. Nielsen, 33, told Britain’s Sky News. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”

Greenland, a self-governing region of Denmark, has been on a path toward independence since at least 2009, when the government in Copenhagen recognised its right to self-determination under international law. Four of the five main parties in the election supported independence, though they disagreed on when and how to achieve it.

The island of 56,000 people, most from Indigenous Inuit backgrounds, has attracted international attention since Mr. Trump announced his designs on it soon after returning to the White House in January.

Mr. Trump is focused on Greenland because it straddles strategic air and sea routes in the North Atlantic and is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base, which supports missile warning and space surveillance operations. Greenland also has large deposits of the rare-earth minerals needed to make everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology.