“And always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse,” Hilaire Belloc advised children, advice that seems to have been taken to heart in Greenland’s general election, producing a surprise result.
The defeat of the ruling Inuit Ataqatigiit party and its ally Siumut by the centre-right Demokraatit party, with Naleraq (Point of Orientation) in second place, was an unexpected outcome.
It is no disrespect to Greenland’s electorate of 41,000, which is smaller than your average UK constituency, to observe that elections in Greenland have not traditionally attracted much attention abroad, nor featured large on the radar of Sir John Curtice. This time, however, was different. Donald Trump’s forecast that the United States would get Greenland, “one way or the other”, had precipitated the ice-bound island into the centre of global geopolitical interest.