TV - Borgen: Power & Glory (2022)
A Danish Foreign Minister's political crisis illuminates our current world's distress
Borgen: Power & Glory (2022)
Streaming on Netflix, 8 episodes
Knudsen as Birgitte Nyborg in the eye of the storm in Borgen: Power & Glory
In the music under the opening credits of Borgen: Power & Glory, a vocalist creates sounds that are steady but frenzied, like breath struggling to catch itself, to keep whoever’s drawing it from dying. In this newly arrived season of the well-received Danish TV series, that sort of dogged persistence pulses through the action all the way to the closing episode. Though Power & Glory begins with what it calls Season 1, it’s actually the fourth season of Borgen; the first three seasons concluded in 2013 and have been shown around the world. It was a sprawling, fascinating fictional depiction of the cut and thrust of contemporary Danish politics. And it left viewers everywhere with a vexing question.
What was to become of its groundbreaking heroine? The popular, charismatic Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Denmark’s first woman Prime Minister, was only entering her 40s in Borgen’s Season 3 finale. By then she’d been forced to resign the nation’s top leadership post and accept the position of Foreign Minister. Could this dynamic woman, with her power somewhat curtailed, still be a major force in Danish politics? The worldwide public wanted to know. The show was a huge hit and has been watched in 70 countries outside Scandinavia.
There was no reason to worry. Birgitte, we quickly realize in Borgen: Power & Glory, hasn’t lost her political touch, or her ability to keep opponents off balance. This new iteration again provides a fictional chronicle of the political infighting in Borgen, the informal name for the Copenhagen complex that contains Denmark's Parliament.
Knudsen, nine years after she last played the role of Birgitte, is an even more poised, compelling performer now. And her Birgitte, though a former Prime Minister, is still the dexterous politician who dazzles both on television and in closed-door power standoffs.
The Prime Minister (Johanne Louise Schmidt) and the Foreign Minister (Sidse Babett Knudsen) in command in Borgen: Power & Glory
She now shares power with, and nominally takes orders from, the mild-mannered yet wily woman Prime Minister Signe Kragh (Johanne Louise Schmidt). Episode 1 is entitled “The Future is Female”, a political slogan coolly devised by Kragh to tighten both women’s hold on power. But Birgitte, no longer at the pinnacle of the national pyramid, understands it will take subtle political gamesmanship to placate her boss and micro-manage Denmark’s prickly foreign entanglements.
And what hornets’ nests she faces! Enormous Greenland, with a land mass nearly as big as Western Europe, has been a protectorate of Denmark’s for three centuries, funded for the last 70 years by a block grant from Copenhagen. Suddenly the dependent territory, pop. 56,000, strikes oil. Lots of it. Greenland’s overjoyed foreign minister Hans Eliassen (Svend Hardenberg) promptly, without consulting Nyborg, signs a drilling deal with a Canadian company.
Not happening, says Nyborg. Denmark is committed to preparing for climate change and steadily decreasing its need for fossil fuels, and Greenland must follow suit. Drilling for oil directly contradicts national policy. Also, perilously, the Canadian drilling partners, she informs Eliassen, are in fact dominated by Russians, including a ruthless exploiter and money launderer inextricably tied to Russia's president, hardly a champion of democracy. Greenland counters that it will conduct its own foreign relations – and manage the oil, too.
Asger Kierkegaard (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) is Denmark’s Arctic Ambassador in Borgen: Power & Glory)
When China and the U.S. learn of the oil find, the Chinese want in, and the Americans want to keep an eye on both China and Russia. Nyborg sees no chance to fend off these powerful players, so she reverses her position and contends that a green energy policy can be pursued along with oil exploration. Her party, the New Democrats, revolts. They remind Birgitte that taking on climate change was a founding principle of their party. Nyborg, as party leader, suddenly faces a vote of no confidence, and if she loses, her tenure as Foreign Minister will be at an end, too.
There’s a lot here for an American audience, unfamiliar with the parliamentary system, to grasp. For Nyborg to keep her job, she has to persuade other parties in the governing coalition to go along with the compromise she’s arguing for – which most politicians see as an about-face and an abandonment of principle. What’s more, print and TV journalists cover this infighting with both apprehension and unbridled glee, goading politicians to be consistent, while delighting in watching them squirm as they succumb to assorted pressures.
The barbs from all sides come thick and fast. One needn’t have watched Seasons 1 through 3 of the original Borgen to appreciate Power & Glory, though some figures from there return for this fourth season. And the maneuvers turn out to be not as hard to follow as one might fear. Jockeying for advantage is a sport that translates into multiple languages and plays out in many settings. Gloating and being crestfallen are easy to recognize on any face, from any nation.
But Power and Glory’s writers have a more specific aim than showing us that political skullduggery knows no national boundaries. They’re zeroing in on the precarious position of women in 21st century politics. Nyborg is their test case to show how male hegemony has been the hallmark of political interaction, whether the combatants are from the West or the East, work for democratic or authoritarian regimes. Time and again Nyborg faces condescension and threats from the American ambassador to Denmark, the U.S. Secretary of State and the Chinese ambassador, all sarcastic, bullying men aiming to show her who’s really in control.
And her male compatriots aren’t as much help as they might be. She dispatches to Greenland her Arctic Ambassador, the scholarly, well-meaning Asger Kierkegaard (an excellent Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). He's a principled young bureaucrat who’s easily outmaneuvered by the determined Eliassen, who won’t be dissuaded from immediately securing 50% of the oil revenue for Greenland. Asger further fails Nyborg by entering into an affair with a married Greenlander (Nivi Pedersen) who’s negotiating for her country.
Magnus (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen) and Mom (Sidse Babett Knudsen) at home in Borgen: Power & Glory
Within Nyborg’s own family, her 18-year-old son Magnus (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen), still at loose ends about his future and crashing at his mother's house half the time, has become a fierce animal rights and climate change activist, publicly opposed to the oil drilling in Greenland. And after Nyborg is politically cornered, she hires a cynical spin doctor who once publicly eviscerated her own family. As she explains to a horrified Magnus, if she’s going to wage a battle, she may as well be guided by a slick and heartless dirty trickster. He’s lower than she is, so she won't have to sink quite so low herself.
Nyborg isn’t the only woman beset by internal doubts and male critics. Katrine Fonsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorenson), once a political activist and spin doctor when Nyborg was Prime Minister, has moved into journalism, where she’s risen to head the news division of Denmark’s most prestigious TV network. But covering her old boss, a woman she once deeply admired, strains Katrine’s objectivity. So adamant is she about not going easy on Nyborg, she loses the respect and confidence of the journalists she supervises. She becomes a petulant, unfair scold, and slowly loses the trust of her staff as well as her bosses. Women in power can tumble before they fully realize they’ve slipped.
All of this is nimbly acted, meticulously directed and — be warned — rushed in the telling. The multiple narratives overlap at such a clip it’s sometimes hard to keep up, but careful listening and watching pay off. The cinematography in Greenland is powerful and soberingly beautiful. The elegy of a hallowed land and a people so long neglected and held in poor esteem radiates from the screen. The camera’s slow sweep of the rocky, snowy landscapes and vast, airy views of the icy Atlantic lead to a moving contemplation of who owns what, where riches belong and how nature actually belongs to no one.
Britain’s Lord Acton (1834-1902) isn’t always quoted accurately. He wrote: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That word “tends” is too often left out of the quote. Which is a serious mistake. One of the characters here notes that society will always need powerful people, because they get things done. But Acton has warned us that since power tends to corrupt, the powerful need to be closely watched, and swiftly replaced when holding onto power outweighs the common good.
Borgen: Power & Glory is suggesting that women in power are as susceptible to this overreach, this tragic misunderstanding, as men. And when they make missteps, ambitious men shouldn’t be counted on to come to their rescue. Nyborg ends up scrambling to salvage her integrity, after paying prices that maybe no one, male or female, could have avoided. Power, she sadly learns, exacts as much as it bestows.