Danes headed to the polls Tuesday in a general election, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen favored to win after gaining support for her firm stance against U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls to annex Greenland.

Frederiksen, a Social Democrat who has been in office since 2019, has been praised for her leadership after fending off Trump's repeated demands to annex Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory he claims the United States needs for national security reasons.

"We stand firm when the winds blow. And it has been blowing around our kingdom," she wrote on Instagram, as she spent part of the day in Aalborg, her electoral stronghold in the country's northwest, with Greenlanders living in Denmark.

The latest polls give the left-wing bloc, for which Frederiksen is the self-proclaimed candidate, a nine-seat lead over the right-wing bloc, but neither side is projected to win a majority of the 179 seats in Denmark's parliament, the Folketing.

"People may not really like her, but they see her as the right leader," Elisabet Svane, political analyst at Danish newspaper Politiken, told AFP.

Frederiksen, who had "a prime minister you can count on" as one of her campaign slogans, "is a unifying figure in a world full of insecurity, and Danes are quite anxious -- there's Greenland, Ukraine, (and mystery) drones" that flew over the Scandinavian country last year, Svane said.

The four overseas seats held by Denmark's two autonomous territories -- two for Greenland and two for the Faroe Islands -- could tip the balance if the election result is very close.

More than 3,000 kilometers away, in Greenland's capital Nuuk, voters were lining up to cast their ballots as soon as polling stations opened.

The campaign has generated more interest than usual in the vast Arctic territory, with more than 20 candidates in the running for the two seats.

"I think it's the most important election for the Danish parliament in Greenland in history," Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told AFP in Nuuk.

"We are in a time where we have a superpower trying to acquire us, take us, control us," he added, stressing that the territory still found itself in a "serious situation."

"I think the most important thing that all the parties in Greenland have agreed on is that we need to work together, whoever gets elected for the parliament," he said.

But Greenlandic voter Lars did not share the view that Greenland's parties stood more united, saying he kept seeing divisions play out on social media.

"Everybody is fighting. Greenlanders are fighting. It's terrible," the lawyer told AFP.

Greenland's main political parties all want independence from Denmark, but differ on the pace of the separation.

The centrist Moderate party, led by Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a two-time former prime minister, could end up kingmaker.

In Denmark, the row over the vast Arctic island has, however, not been central in the campaign.

In the wealthy nation of six million people, the campaign has instead focused on domestic issues, including inflation, the welfare state and high nitrate levels in water from agriculture.

"I think that the centre government has not ensured clean water in Denmark. They have not ensured that we have invested in welfare instead of taxation reliefs," Pia Olsen Dyhr, leader of the socialist Green Left, told AFP after casting her vote.

In a country where the far right has heavily influenced policy since the late 1990s, immigration has also been a hot topic, with the Social Democrats advocating even tighter regulations.

Frederiksen has also defended as "fair" a proposal to deny non-essential health care to people of foreign origin who threaten medical personnel.

Three populist parties are also in the running and opinion polls see them garnering around 19 percent of the vote.

The most established of those is the far-right Danish People's Party, which slumped in the 2022 election but has seen an upswing in opinion polls.

"I want a new beginning for Denmark, and that requires a strong Danish People's Party," party leader Morten Messerschmidt told AFP after voting in Copenhagen.

Elections in Denmark enjoy high participation rates and in 2022, 84.1 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots.

Polling stations in Denmark close at 8:00 pm (1900 GMT), with exit polls expected to be published just after.