Steve Bannon and Online Trolls: How ‘Borgen’ Nails the Current Moment

Back in the early 2010s, some pundits really thought politics had been solved. A majority of Europeans considered themselves liberal; Americans were confident that they were living in a permanent Democratic majority. Into this context strode Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), protagonist of the Danish TV drama Borgen.

In Borgen’s October 2010 series premiere, Birgitte, the late-thirtysomething leader of the Moderate party, pulls off a surprise victory in Denmark’s federal election, becoming the country’s first female prime minister. Through the show’s first three seasons, audiences watched Birgitte raise her kids, get divorced, and complete breast cancer treatment—all while sparring with political adversaries in various professional roles.

When we saw Birgitte off in Borgen’s third-season finale, it was in a new posting as Denmark’s foreign minister. How hard could it be for a center-left politician like her in 2013 Europe? Surely the worst she might have to face in the coming years was boredom, ha ha, sigh.

On June 2, Netflix dropped a new season, now called Borgen: Power & Glory. As she was in the Season 3 finale, Birgitte is Denmark’s foreign minister, but pretty much everything else has changed: the architect she was dating is gone; the new prime minister in whose cabinet she’s serving is a woman; a massive oil deposit has been discovered in Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark; and, of course, the media environment in which Birgitte is trying to practice politics is now utterly toxic.

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It’s this last aspect that most clearly distinguishes Power & Glory from Borgen’s first three seasons, and which feels like the story it most urgently needs to tell.

Media is established as a battleground almost immediately.

When Birgitte shows up to a press conference to announce the loan of a Chinese panda to a Copenhagen zoo, the event is poorly attended because her boss, Prime Minister Signe Kragh (Johanne Louise Schmidt), also scheduled an unrelated press conference at the same time, and didn’t tell Birgitte’s office until 20 minutes before it started.

Because of Denmark’s parliamentary system, Signe, like Birgitte before her, has assembled a coalition government of several different parties. Signe is the Labour leader, while Birgitte heads the New Democrats. So even as Birgitte has committed to support Signe’s agenda, the two are not ideologically aligned on every issue, and predictably chafe against each other given that they only need to be allies until the next federal election makes them rivals again.

Birgitte and Signe are also divided along generational lines; though their age difference—Signe is 41, Birgitte 53—is not significant chronologically, it might as well be a century technologically; we may infer that Signe has essentially lived her entire professional life on social media. When Signe slides in ahead of Birgitte with Denmark’s press corps, does it denote a lack of respect on her part for Birgitte’s work in the foreign ministry, or is it because she rates legacy media less highly than she does the direct address of her own Instagram feed? (She certainly doesn’t seem to perceive the irony of hashtagging every single post she makes with #TheFutureIsFemale while also sidelining her own female colleague.)

The static between Signe and Birgitte only gets louder after the news breaks about the Greenlandic oil. Having won on a very popular green platform, Birgitte can see all the dangers that lie ahead: the drilling would take place very near a UNESCO World Heritage site, committing to extractive energy will derail Denmark’s zero-emissions goals, and access to oil revenue could give Greenland’s pro-independence politicians a stronger footing.

Birgitte is disgusted when Signe’s statement on the subject is aggressively neutral, and eagerly tells a TV1 reporter that she, at least, intends to honor the climate commitments she ran on. But as you might expect when it comes to an oil deposit that (a) is worth billions of dollars and (b) is in a location of considerable strategic importance to the U.S. and Russia, more information only makes Birgitte’s job more complicated.

On orders from various local and international stakeholders, Birgitte must obfuscate the situation both in private meetings with her peers in government, and in TV news hits, each of which chips a little more off her highly respected legacy. Unlike Signe, Birgitte lacks an instinctual understanding of how to use social media feeds to construct her own image and narrative outside the traditional outlets of the press.

When Birgitte isn’t submitting to adversarial TV1 questioning on the subject of Greenland’s oil, she’s volunteering to appear so she can do damage control on her home life. Her son Magnus (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen, taking over from Emil Poulsen, who played the role as a child in the first three seasons) is a college student whose views are far to the left of his famous mother’s.

In the Power & Glory premiere, we see Magnus and a couple of friends steal a truck from a pork farm and drive it to a field, where they release the pigs to freedom. The pigs are ultimately euthanized, so Magnus’s protest has no effect beyond embarrassing Birgitte once the press connects the incident to her. But by this point in the series, Birgitte has made a decision that, more than any other, shows how desperate she is to preserve her career, no matter the cost: she’s asked Michael Laugesen to be her spin doctor.

Laugesen (Peter Mygind) started the series as the head of the Labour party, who intended to win the federal election by smearing the sitting Prime Minister with a story about his temporary misappropriation of funds. Instead, Laugesen’s move just made him look sleazy, emboldening others in his party to unearth their most damaging stories on him, and leading Laugesen to leave politics to edit a disreputable tabloid rag.

It is in this capacity that Laugesen ran with the story of Birgitte’s daughter Laura (Freja Riemann) and her in-patient mental health treatment. There’s no question that Laugesen is a scumbag, but now he happens to be a scumbag who’s willing to defend Birgitte on TV for having the will to survive her scandals. Birgitte never entirely loses her distaste for Laugesen as a person even as she lets him post bland posts on her Instagram feed (and possibly buy her a bunch of followers), seek out dodgy climate scientists to defend the Greenland drilling plans, and convince her to appear with Magnus on a female-targeted talk show that will let her present herself as a stern yet fond mom who fosters passionate political debate at home.

Earlier in the season, we learned that Signe intended to appoint Laugesen, an old Labour friend, to a powerful position in her government until aggressive reporting made it politically untenable for her. It seems he’s using the same empty “girl power” script to define Birgitte that has worked so well for Signe… also at Laugesen’s direction? Whether he’s Signe’s Svengali is unclear, but it does seem like there’s a lot of opportunity for someone like Laugesen to build a career for himself as Denmark’s Steve Bannon. As we continue to see in this country, politicians’ race to the bottom can be wildly lucrative for the aides who surround them—and if the political tides turn, those aides can just take it all back in their tell-all books.

Back to TV1, which also finds itself in a state of flux as we rejoin the characters we got to know in Borgen’s first three seasons. The network’s ratings are tanking, and Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) has been named the new Head Of News Operations. A TV and newspaper journalist who also served as Birgitte’s comms head in the earliest days of the New Democrats, a party Birgitte founded, Katrine adapts uneasily to a managerial position, particularly with on-air anchor Narciza Aydin (Özlem Saglanmak).

A queer woman of color, Narciza calls out Katrine for an offhand remark about an editorial choice being “too politically correct,” and their professional relationship never really recovers. Even as other reporters try to get Katrine to temper her criticisms, Katrine can’t stop finding fault with Narciza, eventually pulling her off the air entirely. The reaction by Narciza’s fans is swift and fierce, as Katrine becomes the subject of Facebook comments and tweets about her management—an all-too-real experience for women in public life across all fields. It’s probably only the lack of recent footage of Katrine at work that has spared her from becoming a hateful meme on TikTok; Amber Heard has not been so lucky.

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These grow so hostile that Katrine finally has a panic attack at a party convention from which her partner, Søren Ravn (Lars Mikkelsen) must evacuate her. In the finale’s last moments, we learn that she’s left her job and is planning to write a book about Danish politics, while Narciza has applied to succeed her as news head. This plotline is, unfortunately, less thoughtfully developed than the character of Katrine deserves after the three previous seasons we’ve known her. Is Katrine plagued by unconscious racial biases she is unwilling or unable to confront? Or is the issue that she’s a born journalist who is ill-suited to management?

One can imagine a version of a fourth Borgen season that hewed more closely to the first three. Credit the healthy Nordic lifestyle for the fact that none of its stars really look a decade older than they did when we saw them last; it wouldn’t have been that big a reach to set a season in 2014, and let us spend time with Birgitte in a pre-Brexit, pre-Trump timeline.

There’s precedent for such things: when the cast of The West Wing reunited for a special in 2020, there was no attempt to speak to the current moment; instead, they just re-staged an episode that originally aired in 2002. But Borgen has always been bolder and more ambitious than The West Wing, and Power & Glory proves it: it’s hard to acknowledge the current state of politics and news, but nothing will change if we don’t see them, even fictionally, as they actually are.

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