2023 Greenlandic general election

  

2023 Greenlandic general election

March 24, 2023

All 31 seats in the Parliament of Greenland 16 seats needed for a majority

Party Leader % Seats +/– GSD Wolfgang Reinhardsen 35.48% 11 +7 GF Johannes Roesen 29.03% 9 +7 Højre Bjørn Erichsen 25.80% 8 -14 Cooperation Lars Magnuson 9.69% 3 +1 This lists parties that won seats. See the complete results below. Minister of State before Minister of State after Bjørn Erichsen Højre Johannes Roesen GF

The 2023 Greenlandic general election took place on March 24, 2023, to elect all 31 members of the Parliament of Greenland. The election resulted in Højre, which has been the leading party of Greenland since its independence in 1876, lose its majority in the parliament for the first time in the country's history, dropping from 22 to 8 seats. The Greenlandic Social Democratic Party (GSD) rose from 4 seats to 11, the Greenlandic People's Party (GF) rose from 2 seats to 9, and the Cooperation Party increased from 2 seats to 3. Afterwards, Højre and GF established a governing coalition, this time with the People's Party as the senior partner in the coalition. Johannes Roesen became the Minister of State for a second term, this time as the leader of GF instead of as a member of Højre, and succeeded the long-serving Bjørn Erichsen, who also announced his retirement from politics.

The election has been called historic because of Greenland's dominant party losing its control of the parliament after nearly 150 years in power. The party's response to the economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was seen as the main reason for its decline in popularity since the 2019 election, along with the Greenlandic People's Party portraying itself as being more hard right-wing than Højre and taking a significant amount of the conservative vote. The 2023 election was the first time that a party other than Højre achieved the plurality of seats (the Social Democrats) and led to the first Minister of State from a party other than Højre (the People's Party).

Electoral system

Seats are distributed on the basis of open list proportional representation, where parties publish their list of candidates for parliamentary seats and each party is allocated a number of seats based on its percentage of the popular vote.

Campaigning

Two electoral alliances were formed in 2022 ahead of the election:

• Højre Bloc, Højre and the Greenlandic People's Party. They agreed to an electoral platform that has been described as more explicitly Christian conservative and anti-immigration than Højre's previous positions, including support for the Catholic Church, and was a response to cultural developments in Anglo-America in recent years. It also opposes "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" and calls for a mandate to use the Danish language in certain settings instead of English, to defend Greenland's culture. The bloc is more skeptical of the CAS and wants to maintain it as an association rather than a federalized bureaucracy.
• United Left of Greenland, the Greenlandic Social Democratic Party and the Cooperation Party. Their electoral platform consists of expanding the welfare state in the wake of COVID-19 and social justice issues, though their primary focus is economic, supporting working-class voters in the cities of Greenland that were hit harder by the effects of the pandemic than people living in rural areas and villages. The United Left also supports more CAS integration and adopting the amero as the currency of Greenland.

Aftermath

The two conservative parties announced a governing coalition agreement on March 25, 2023, based on the electoral platform that had been agreed to months earlier during the campaign. Johannes Roesen was sworn in as the new Minister of State on the same day by Frederik Vilhelm III, Prince of Greenland.