President Donald Trump has made several overtures towards Greenland and has even stated that he believes Greenlanders want to be with the US rather than Denmark.
But now Greenlanders are putting their foot down once and for all after weeks of heated debate around the future of the Kingdom of Denmark.
In a new poll conducted by Verian for Berlingske and the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq, 85 percent of Greenlanders say no to the idea that they want Greenland to leave the Danish Realm and become part of the US instead.
Only 6 percent of Greenlanders want to leave the Danish Realm in favour of the US, and 9 percent are undecided.
»Compared to what Donald Trump has said previously, this is very clear evidence that the reality is different,« says Kasper Møller Hansen, an election researcher and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen who has studied opinion polls for years.
In the same poll, 45 percent of Greenlanders say they perceive Donald Trump's interest in Greenland as a threat, and only 8 per cent would accept a US passport if they had to decide right now whether they wanted Danish or American citizenship.
»No one in the White House who has anything remotely to do with Greenland has believed the story that Donald Trump has been attempting to tell. You would only believe it if you had never dealt with Greenland before,« says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) who has in-depth knowledge of changes within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Ulrik Pram Gad believes that the poll figures debunk Donald Trump's narrative of a Greenlandic people who want to be American.
A poll has previously been quoted in US media showing that 57 percent of Greenlanders wanted to be part of the United States.
As Berlingske reported earlier this month, that poll has even been used as part of Russia's propaganda machine and was cited more than 300 times in Russian media within just a few days.
But now this new poll, commissioned by Berlingske and Sermitsiaq, has disproved any talk of a pro-American majority in the Greenlandic population.
»It's difficult to conduct surveys in Greenland, because the geography is as colossal and dispersed as it is, but this poll is the best we have. It's really exciting to get the first indication of how things are playing out in Greenland in the run-up to their own elections,« Kasper Møller Hansen says, elaborating:
»They don't want to be Americans. This is very, very clear in this poll. That is what they are saying here.«
The poll was conducted between 22 January and 26 January and is based on web interviews with 497 representative samples of Greenlandic citizens aged 18 or older.
All responses from the poll, which Berlingske will be publishing over the next few days, have a statistical uncertainty of between 1.9 and 4.4 percentage points.
Berlingske is one of Denmark's leading national newspapers, covering politics and society, business, culture and the most important social debates of the day. The newspaper is one of the oldest in the world, having been founded in 1749, and is published daily.
This article was translated by Bibi Solveig Christensen from the original Danish article, found here.