Clinging To Power

The first season of Borgen draws to a close as Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) comes up on the first anniversary of her ascent to power as Denmark's first female Prime Minister, and thus her first opportunity to open Parliament with a speech intended to inspire her fellow politicians to bring their very best selves to the new year of policy development, and to shore up her position at the head of that government. Unfortunately, it's come at a time when her party is losing ground to Labour in the polls as well as in the makeup of Parliament, and as her marriage has come to a definitive end. This is a woman who may not be able to inspire anyone to do anything right now. All she's inspired to do is angrily sweep all the stuff off her desk. (And frankly, this is the only time this TV cliché has ever made sense to me: at least Birgitte has people who can pick all that shit up for her afterward.)

First, there's the matter of Birgitte's marriage. As the season's penultimate episode (sadly) set up, things aren't going so well between Birgitte and her husband Phillip (Mikkael Birkkjær). People are starting to notice that she's been sleeping at Marienborg, and in order to keep press attention off her private life, Birgitte has to find a way to keep up appearances, and comes to Phillip with a proposal: if he'll continue to act as her husband for official purposes, she'll decide to be okay with him seeking intimacy outside their marriage, as long as he's discreet about it. It's clear in the scene that Phillip thinks she's coming to him to recommit to their marriage and is grossed out and dismayed by this suggestion, but for the sake of their kids (and of her government, I suppose), he agrees. Shit's awkward and the kids can obviously tell things aren't as they used to be, but at least they're gathered around the same table having dinner together so that's something, right?

Birgitte and Phillip might have continued occupying the reanimated corpse of their dead marriage if not for the demands of the press. On the eve of the big speech to Parliament, Birgitte is going to participate in a profile for TV1, for which Kasper (Pilou Asbæk) finagles Katrine (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen); Kasper gets Birgitte to agree by saying he'll strike a deal with TV1 to retain editing rights for the material filmed at home -- and manages to get Torben (Søren Malling) to sign off on it by threatening to take the interview to a competitor. So then Birgitte has to sell it to Phillip, who agrees to this, too. But the experience of faking it for the cameras is ultimately what makes him realize he can't continue: "The best thing that's ever happened to me is what you and I had. You and me. But in that interview yesterday, we turned all that into a travesty. And we aced it. I mean, we-- We sat there betraying it with big smiles on our faces." He asks for a divorce.

If the whole season has been a study of compromise -- how to balance competing political agendas, mostly, but also the demands of a high-powered job and a young family --  the finale becomes a referendum on the deals Birgitte has struck and whether they've been worth it. Compromising her own emotional needs for the sake of her office clearly hasn't been worth it, since it's made her whole family miserable for months. Compromising her ethics for the sake of the TV profile wasn't; it caused her to lose face with Kasper (even though it was his idea) and finally pushed Phillip too far. And now the compromises of her wishy-washy leadership has led to the ascendancy of Labour, giving its leadership the leverage to demand that Birgitte sacrifice Bent (Lars Knutzon), her dearest friend in politics and effective consigliere, in order to maintain her own position.

So when she critiques Kasper on a draft of the speech and he angrily shoots back, "What do you want? Why should I vote for you? Have you got any agenda apart from clinging to power?," it feels like a fair question. This isn't the Birgitte Nyborg we met in the series premiere, with firm ideas about social justice and the duties Danes have to support one another and such strong ethics that she didn't exploit the gift of a scandalous revelation about a political opponent and fired the aide who did. That lady would have never fired Bent.

But, of course, we could have predicted this: practically all fictional politicians end up being forced to abandon their idealistic notions of government and evolve into cold-eyed pragmatists, and not even one who's explicitly a Moderate could have stayed that way. In the end, the speech -- in which Birgitte exhorts her fellow Danes to be less materialistic and to believe in what they can achieve if they work together -- is a success (Bent and even Søren Spanning's Lars Hesselboe, the head of the opposition coalition, are visibly moved), for whatever that's worth. While Katrine, the journalist hand-picked to celebrate Birgitte's life and work, is so shocked by the compromises that underpinned her return to TV1 that she resigns in disgust, Birgitte herself seems nearly as cynical as her spin doctor. Though Birgitte has ended the season in triumph in some respects, we still don't really know what she will do with the power she's strained so hard to hang onto.