Greenland voted for pro-independence party in Tuesday’s election, a decision Trump welcomed.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen snapped back at Donald Trump’s recent comments suggesting that Greenland’s latest election results are “good” for United States interests.
“It’s a misinterpretation of the Greenlandic election to conclude that we’ll have an independent Greenland tomorrow, flying a white flag that can then be painted with stars and stripes,” Rasmussen said in an interview with Danish TV 2 on Friday.
The center-right Democrats defeated the governing left-wing coalition in Greenland’s Tuesday election, while a pro-U.S. party recorded its best result ever.
The Democrats party, which describes itself as pro-business, more than tripled its result from the previous election in 2021, garnering about 30 percent of the vote. The party supports Greenland’s independence — but only gradually.
Trump made the comments during a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Thursday, adding that the winning party’s leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, is “a very good person.”
Trump repeated the sentiment that annexing Greenland “will happen.”
However, incoming Greenlandic leader Nielsen has pushed back strongly against Trump’s comments.
“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 told Sky News. “And we want to build our own country by ourselves.”
Trump caused international uproar in January when he said the U.S. taking control of the world’s largest island, a Danish territory, is an “absolutely necessity” for American security, and refused to rule out economic or military coercion to gain control of it.
Denmark responded by announcing it would spend €2 billion to boost its Arctic defenses, with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen arranging a flurry of diplomatic meetings with other European leaders in an effort to keep the territory out of Trump’s hands.
