Greenland’s political parties have united under a new political goal: opposing U.S. aggression.
Four political parties in the self-governing territory formed a coalition government Friday to project unity against Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the island. Greenland has 56,000 residents and is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. The new coalition will hold 21 out of 31 parliamentary seats.
The new majority government will be fronted by the island’s pro-business, pro-independence, center-right Demokraatit Party, making its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the new prime minister. Nielsen led the island’s effort to set aside party differences in order to coalesce under “heavy pressure” from America, reported Reuters.
“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,” Nielsen, 33, told Sky News the night his party won a decisive majority in Parliament. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”
The announcement came just hours before Vice President JD Vance, second lady Usha Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. space base on the island.
The vice president’s trip to Greenland was radically pared down this week after locals dissented to the Vance family’s prospective tourism parade of Greenland’s cities.
American representatives were seen walking around Greenland’s capital Nuuk earlier this week, canvassing residents to see if people would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife, Usha Vance.
“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” reported TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz.
Greenland’s government said in a statement posted on Facebook Monday that it had “not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official.”
The territory has not taken kindly to what its officials have described as Trump’s repeated “aggression” against Greenland’s sovereignty. Over the last several months, the U.S. president has made odd jokes and eyebrow-raising militaristic threats about buying and annexing Greenland and shipped his son and MAGA allies to the island for a slapdash photo op with the island’s homeless.
In a statement posted to Facebook, Greenland’s outgoing Prime Minister Múte Egede urged islanders to “toughen our rejection of Trump” and the U.S. leader’s repeated attacks on Greenland’s political independence.
“Enough is enough,” he wrote. “People cannot continue to disrespect us.”
When asked earlier this month, during a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, whether he believed that the U.S. would annex Greenland, Trump said: “I think it’ll happen.”
Trump first became obsessed with the idea of owning Greenland in 2019, when he canceled a state visit to Denmark after it refused to sell the island to him.
The post Greenland’s New Government Has One Main Goal: Defying Trump appeared first on New Republic.
