NUUK, Greenland, March 13, (AP): Greenland’s likely new prime minister on Wednesday rejected US President Donald Trump’s effort to take control of the island, saying Greenlanders must be allowed to decide their own future as it moves toward independence from Denmark. Jens-Frederik Nielsen’s Demokraatit, a pro-business party that favors a slow path to independence, won a surprise victory in Tuesday’s parliamentary election, outpacing the two left-leaning parties that formed the last government.

With most Greenlanders opposing Trump’s overtures, the campaign focused more on issues like healthcare and education than on geopolitics. But on Wednesday Nielsen was quick to push back against Trump, who last week told a joint session of Congress that the US needed Greenland to protect its own national security interests and he expected to get it "one way or the other.”

"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, 33, told Britain’s Sky News. "And we want to build our own country by ourselves.” Greenland, a self-governing region of Denmark, has been on a path toward independence since at least 2009, when the government in Copenhagen recognized its right to self-determination under international law.

Four of the five main parties in the election supported independence, though they disagreed on when and how to achieve it. The island of 56,000 people, most from Indigenous Inuit backgrounds, has attracted international attention since Trump announced his designs on it soon after returning to the White House in January.

Trump is focused on Greenland because it straddles strategic air and sea routes in the North Atlantic and is home to the US’s Pituffik Space Base, which supports missile warning and space surveillance operations. Greenland also has large deposits of the rare-earth minerals needed to make everything from mobile phones to renewable energy technology. But Trump’s overtures weren’t on the ballot.