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Greenland endures embarrassing political upheavals

Hans Enoksen is still Greenland’s premier, but only as the head of a shaky new coalition

Siku Circumpolar
News Services

NUUK, GREENLAND — For the past three weeks, Greenland’s political scene has looked like a bad soap opera full of "political games of Kafka-ish proportions" — as one high-ranking Greenlandic politician put it.

For the moment, Hans Enoksen, Greenland’s recently elected premier, is still leading an unsteady new coalition government, formed after his original coalition collapsed last week.

The dominos began to fall when Jens Lyberth, the acting director for Enoksen’s home rule government, asked a traditional healer to cleanse the head office of bad spirits.

Lyberth, the unilingual premier’s personal strategist and interpreter, supported the séance because his government wanted to make the home rule government more "Greenlandic."

During the séance, the healer reportedly felt "vibrations" of conflict between Danish colonialists and former home rule government members.

As word of the cleansing ceremony began to circulate, Enoksen’s Siumut Party became an easy target for ridicule, and its coalition partners, the Inuit Ataqatigiit Party, announced that their eight elected members would drop their support for the coalition government.

They told the other political parties in Greenland that they would no longer co-operate with the Siumut party, because Enoksen had engaged in political patronage by personally recruiting Lyberth and two other high-profile Siumut Party members for top bureaucratic positions in the new government.

Ironically, the break-up began to unfold on Jan. 9, while the parties’ leaders were attending a self-government conference called "Greenland and the future" at the Danish parliament building in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While in Copenhagen, Inuit Ataqatigiit started to negotiate with the centre-right Atassut Party and the Democrat Party to form a new coalition.

For a time, it seemed possible that the leader of the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit Party, Josef Motzfeldt, might actually have a chance of becoming premier.

But back in Greenland, the two newly elected MLAs with the Atassut Party said they wouldn’t join ranks with Inuit Ataqatigiit in any coalition, and that they wanted Enoksen to stay on as premier.

The Inuit Ataqatigiit’s dream of leading Greenland suddenly became a nightmare.

Meanwhile, still in Denmark, Enoksen informed the three Siumut Party members he had hired that they would be immediately dismissed from their jobs.

On Jan. 13, the leaders went back home to Greenland.

In Nuuk, Siumut and Inuit Ataqatigiit government members had a few meetings — and it looked for a while as if they still might be able to cooperate.

But this new rapport didn’t last, and on Jan. 15, the Siumut Party announced the end of its alliance with Inuit Ataqatigiit and the start of negotiations with the Atassut party.

The next day, Jan. 16, Enoksen announced that he had managed to strike an agreement with Atassut to form a new coalition government.

So as of this week, Enoksen is still the premier of Greenland.

Jorgen Fleischer, the former editor of Greenland’s Atuagalliutit newspaper and an observer of Greenlandic politics for 50 years, said he’s never seen anything like it before.

"Here in Greenland, we are embarrassed about this situation, particularly when we think about our reputation in the other places. The top leaders are behaving like kids in kindergarten," he said.

Fleischer is already predicting the home rule government’s new coalition won’t last more than a year.

Siumut and Atassut together hold 17 of the 31 seats in the Greenlandic parliament. The parties have been in coalitions twice before, from 1995 to 1999, and from 2001 to 2002.

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