Election of the day: Faroe Islands

In a rather curious scheduling pattern, Faroe Island voters will return to the polls just 48 hours after selecting their two representatives in Danish parliament, to elect their own: The Løgting, a 33 seat legislative body (elected by single constituency PR) of this autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark. The small archipelago between Scotland and Iceland has a virtually identical population to that other, more geopolitically interesting Danish realm in the North Atlantic. The Faroes are, socially and culturally, more like a small Nordic nation than Greenland, with high income and employment levels and a strong local economy with fisheries as the leading role.

As with the Kingdom, this is a snap election. A month ago, prime minister called for a nine-month early election on the grounds that “the government coalition has basically been absent” in recent weeks. This comes nine months ahead of schedule. The outlook is grim for the current government, a three party coalition of the Social Democratic Party (Javnaðarflokkurin), Republic (Tjóðveldi), and Progress (Framsókn). This is a fairly left wing coalition, with two parties of the left, SDP and Republic, and the liberal Progress party. As with Greenland, Faroe Islanders have significant autonomy over domestic affairs, but also as with Greenland, full independence is an ongoing and contentious political issue. The three opposition parties, led by the Faroese People’s Party, a conservative party with a more aggressive pro-independence than the parties in the governing coalition, has a wide lead in the 6-7 party field. The second place party in polling is also conservative, but represents Faroe’s only explicitly pro-Union party, the aptly named Unionists. Together, the opposition parties collectively lead the three parties in government by over 20 points in the latest poll. (There is one pollster who regularly publishes polls in this race; I obviously can’t vouch for the quality, so this could be way off.) The Social Democrats, the party leading the current coalition (with 9 seats) is probably the second-most pro-union party; they support independence but with no particular urgency. So should the polling prove correct, the People’s party may face a choice–form a government of conservative parties, or form a government of pro-independence parties, but not both. If you’d like speculation about which direction they’re more likely to go, I’m afraid that’s beyond my capability to provide.

Two recent votes seem to have done real damage to the current coalition: first, a proposal to build a subsea tunnel between the islands Sandoy and Suðuroy. It appears to be the case that Progress made their support for the tunnel, which would be the largest and most expensive infrastructure project in Faroese history by a wide margin (although not the first subsea tunnel between islands, this would be more than twice as long as any other, at around 13-15 miles), conditional on the government passing one of their hobbyhorses, raising the retirement age from 68 to 70, incrementally between 2035 and 2042. Ultimately the government proceeded with the tunnel vote when the support for raising the retirement age was tenuous and uncertain, causing some Progress MPs to unexpectedly defect.

The tunnel project would be a very big deal for the roughly 4600 residents of Suðuroy; the commute to the capital by ferry takes over 2 hours. The case for raising the pension age makes good long-term sense for all the reasons you’d expect, namely an aging population and a labor shortage, but it’s controversial, particularly among the more left-wing parties, for reasons that are also easily understood. The breaking of the linkage between the two votes proved to be the end of the coalition; seconds after the tunnel vote passed Prime Minister Jonannesen told the speaker to dissolve parliament and call for elections immediately.

I’m not sure where the Faroese People’s Party stands on the tunnel (it should be noted that I’m piecing this narrative together via some sources I’m not entirely sure how much to trust, so grains of salt all around please), although they’ve voted to advance the project through procedural votes in the past. I also haven’t been able to find anything about where they stand on raising the retirement age, which has not yet advanced. Faroese independence ambitions seem at least slightly more plausible than those of Greenland, although their national security strategy involves leaning heavily on assumptions about NATO membership at a time that that particular international alliance is, as some of you may have noticed, under some real stress. They have a more stable and plausibly self-sufficient economy than Greenland, and while also subsidized by Denmark the level of subsidy is a small fraction of the Greenland subsidy. Of course, many practical challenges would remain. Whether the People’s Party would press forward, if victorious as expected, would be partially determined by whether they end up leading a sovereigntist coalition or a conservative one.

As always, anyone with more and better information than what I’ve gleaned from scant English language sources is very much encouraged to weigh in to correct my errors, add more context, or both.