The beginning of July has found us well settled in Bergen. There was much to do since our return, but we have been offering ourselves some time daily for two indoors leisure activities, both linked with TV sendings: the UEFA Euro 2102 and the Danish series Borgen.
The final in the former was played on Sunday and it was a strange pleasure seeing the PIGS doing so much better than the Central and Northern European countries! But even for the winners from Spain the party is over, and all need to return to more serious occupations and consider the future of politics and finances in the crisis-struck European South: from EURO to €uro…
Let’s take the example of Greece: there is a new government formed by a coalition of three parties and this coalition will have to discuss the way the country will come out of the crisis without getting out of the Euro currency, which seems to have prevailed in the political consciousness of the Greek citizens in the elections of the 17th of June.
This is where the TV series Borgen comes fittingly into the picture. For it sets on the scene the adventures of an imaginary first female prime-minister in Denmark who is leading precisely such a government of coalition (in fact, the Danes elected their first female prime minister last year). Perhaps the TV persona of Birgitte Nyborg is much more gifted than the politicians who run the business in Greece (or elsewhere…), but the creators of the series have thus set in front of the eyes of their public a very noble goal to achieve: the finding of a leading figure who is guided by high morals and a sharp logic to overcome the difficulties of hard decisions, assisted by a team of bureaucrats and ministers that are moving between professionalism, loyalty, devotion, and … their opposites!
Yes, as a TV series, Borgen also brings forward all the spicey details of the main characters’ personal lives. But it never misses the point and this is none other than the discussion of all sorts of political problems. An astute trick to achieve this is the brilliant idea to balance the political milieu with the world of journalism! And to mix them by exposing the most hidden interlinking aspects – including sexual partnerships and revenges…
But what is the relevant point here, is that if the government that Nyborg is leading manages to succeed in pushing ahead its policies, it is because there is honesty and transparency in most of its acts, or at least surely the wish that this is the rule followed by the leading persons in the drama. May we please have a piece of that cake in South Europe too?
The optimism is so much characteristic of the entire program that even in an episode where the war between North and South Sudan appears (camouflaged under the name of an imaginary country called “Kharoun” coined obviously from the name of the Sudanese capital “Khartoum”), the presidents of the two conflicting states (an Islamic northern one and a Christian southern one, not yet separated in the TV “reality”) find in the end a way to communicate and coexist (despite the huge cultural differences and the conflicts regarding the sharing of the oil resources…).
The role of Birgitte Nyborg is of course crucial, and although she has her own aspirations of political profit out of this involvement, in a world where international diplomacy could be functioning more ethically, such a foreign intervention should be welcome, right?
In the meantime, and in the harsh reality of our world, the resolutions are to be found through revolutions – for as long as the state affairs are not administered by democratically elected governments or by governments that have lost their popular support but refuse to withdraw…and this is not elbow licking 
