After tense US-Greenland standoff, Denmark calls an early election

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Thursday called an early general election for March 24 as the country digests the recent standoff with U.S. President Donald Trump over his designs on the semiautonomous Danish territory of Greenland.

Frederiksen likely hopes that her handling of the Greenland crisis, in which she appeared straight-talking and tough, will give her a boost with Danish voters.

“It is now up to you, the voters, to decide what direction Denmark will take over the next four years. And I am looking forward to it,” Frederiksen, 48, said as she made her announcement in parliament.

Voters in the NATO and European Union member will determine who sits in 179-member parliament, which includes two seats apiece for lawmakers representing Greenland and the kingdom's other semiautonomous territory, the Faroe Islands.

Trump’s push for U.S. control of Greenland, which culminated in his short-lived threat last month to impose new tariffs on Denmark and several other European countries, was a major challenge for the Danish government over the past year.

Last month, Frederiksen warned that an American takeover of Greenland would amount to the end of the NATO military alliance.

Polls also show a bump in the popularity of the prime minister’s Social Democrats during recent weeks which were dominated by the looming Greenland crisis.

Some Danish citizens have been so upset with the U.S. president’s frequent talks about seizing Greenland that they participated in protests and even boycotted American goods in supermarkets.

As she announced the election on Thursday, Frederiksen said in parliament: “This will be a crucial election for us, because in the next four years, we as Danes and as Europeans will really have to stand on our own two feet.”

“We must define our relationship with the U.S. We must arm ourselves to ensure peace on our continent. We must keep Europe together,” she added referring to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, which is now in its fifth year.

After Trump backed down on his Greenland threats last month, the U.S., Denmark and Greenland started technical talks on an Arctic security deal.

Still, Frederiksen made clear earlier this month that she remains wary about the Greenland issue. Asked at the Munich Security Conference whether the crisis had passed, she replied: “No, unfortunately not. I think the desire from the U.S. president is exactly the same. He is very serious about this theme.”

Frederik Hjorth, an associate professor for political science at the University of Copenhagen, said: “The Greenland crisis has played a major part in the noticeable bump that the government parties have received over the last couple of months.”

While Trump would likely not feature in a major way in the election campaign, “he will be a sort of a background theme in the campaign because that speaks to the government message of the importance of having, competent people in charge.”

Frederiksen, a center-left Social Democrat, has become known for her strict immigration policies, which are among the toughest in Europe.

Last month, her government unveiled a legal reform allowing the deportation of foreigners who have been sentenced to at least one year of unconditional imprisonment for serious crimes. Years before other countries on the continent tried to outsource asylum request procedures to third countries or set up so-called “return hubs” for rejected asylum seekers outside the European Union, Frederiksen pitched such ideas.

Beyond that, the cost of living in Denmark will probably also become a prominent campaign topic, Hjorth said.

A general election must be held at least every four years but the prime minister can call one at any time. The last election was held on Nov. 1, 2022, and resulted in a three-party coalition that crosses the left-right divide.

Frederiksen has led Denmark since mid-2019. She currently heads a government with the Liberal Party of Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen and the centrist Moderate party of Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, a former prime minister. If she gets reelected, it would be her third term.

Campaigning began almost immediately after the announcement, with major commercial news outlets showing political advertising for the Social Democrats, while supporters of the populist anti-immigration Danish People’s party began leafleting in parliament in Copenhagen.

The call for early elections by Frederiksen came as little surprise to some people.

“I can see the support for her. It’s up. So I mean, strategically, I think it’s a smart choice,” Laura Beyer, 33, who works in social media marketing, said in Copenhagen.

Referring to the Greenland situation, Beyer applauded the prime minister for how she handled the crisis and said she herself could have not withheld under the immense American pressure.

“I think if I was in that situation I would have just passed out from stress,” Beyer said, adding: “I think she’s done the best that she could. And from my perspective, I don’t think how anyone could do differently.”

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Grieshaber reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalist Geir Moulson, also in Berlin, contributed.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaks in the Folketing hall, the Danish parliament, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. (Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen arrives at the Folketing hall, the Danish parliament, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. (Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaks in the Folketing hall, the Danish parliament, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. (Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announces an upcoming parliamentary election, in the Parliament Hall at Christiansborg, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. (Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announces an upcoming parliamentary election, in the Parliament Hall at Christiansborg, in Copenhagen, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026. (Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See's role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”

History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling.

Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.

“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits,” welcomed the apology as a "monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”

“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy," said Williams. “Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery--and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”

The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.

In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.

The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.

Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”

Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.

In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and weren't to be enslaved.

In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes — Gregory the Great — had slaves, Kellerman said.

In acknowledging the 15th century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”

Leo said it wasn't possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.

“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.

The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”

“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.

Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”

Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the church's complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.

Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery.

“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” he told The Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”

During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”

According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.

During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal’s colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn’t refer specifically to slavery.

Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope Leo XIV speaks during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV listens to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, right, during the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV, left, attends the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV, left, arrives with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin for the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, right, talks to theologian Leocadie Lushombo during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV holds the pastoral staff as he celebrates the Pentecost Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Sunday, May 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)