This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.
Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.
Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control.
Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”
Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.
More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.
The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect.
But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.
That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island. “With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me.
That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party—whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise—appealing to voters.
In its manifesto, the center-right party—known as the Democrats—said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”