Victor seeks partners after Greenland vote

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NUUK, Greenland, March 14 (UPI) -- Leaders of the Siumut Party, which won a plurality in Greenland's parliamentary election, said Wednesday they will take their time finding coalition partners.

The party won almost 43 percent of the vote Tuesday, giving it 14 seats in the 31-member Parliament, the Sermitsiaq newspaper reported. Aleqa Hammond, the party leader who is likely to become Greenland's first woman prime minister, said they plan to talk over coffee with leaders of the smaller parties.

The election appears to be a rejection of outgoing Prime Minister Kuupik Kleist's policy of aggressively seeking foreign investors to exploit Greenland's mineral wealth, The Wall Street Journal reported. Kleist's Inuit Community Party came in second with 34.4 percent of the vote and 11 parliamentary seats.

None of the smaller parties won more than two seats.

Hammond promised during the campaign "to introduce royalties on resources and want to be more demanding when it comes to companies from abroad."

Greenland, with a population of fewer than 57,000 people on the world's largest island, is a semiautonomous territory under the Danish crown. But it depends heavily on Danish subsidies the Journal put at $607 million a year.

"The new government has to realize reforms. Greenland has to diversify its economy and get people better educated in order not to face ever increasing public spending," Torben M. Andersen, an economist and head of the country's economic council, told the Journal.

In December, Parliament approved a plan to allow companies planning major investment in Greenland to bring in foreign workers.