Borgen

A general election has been called in Denmark. The new leader of the centrist Moderate Party, 40-year-old Birgitte Nyborg Christensen, has quickly gained great popularity among the electorate thanks to her natural manner and sincere humanism. However, Birgitte is under pressure, as her party has not yet declared its support for either of the two obvious candidates for prime minister. Birgitte's campaign is under the firm control of her intelligent, but somewhat cynical, 30-year-old media adviser, Kasper Juul. He is a master of the interface between politics and the media, and exploits his connections. In particular, his connection with the young TV presenter Katrine Fønsmark, with whom he had a relationship three years ago. Katrine is the new face at TV1; she is talented and hard-working, and, like Kasper, she understands how to make use of her connections at "the Castle", as the parliament is known.

In the days following the big landslide election, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen finds herself in the eye of a political storm. Her party, the Moderates, were the principal winners in the election, and Birgitte has been appointed Royal Formateur to lead the inter-party negotiations. Her job now is to bring together a divided parliament and form a new government. This turns out to be a tougher task than Birgitte could ever have imagined. The first day of negotiations results in a painful defeat for Birgitte. Lars Hesselboe of the Liberal Party contemptuously sends a low-ranking party member, and Labour Party leader Michael Laugesen does not attend at all. Birgitte's party vice-chairman and mentor Bent Sejrø stresses that Birgitte needs to start showing courage and decisiveness. All meetings are postponed.

Two months after Birgitte Nyborg succeeded in forming a government and becoming prime minister, she now faces her greatest challenge yet: the annual state budget. The budget bill must be passed by parliament before they can all take a well-deserved Christmas break. But in the middle of the official press conference, Birgitte is confronted with the news that two members of the Labour Party are refusing to vote for the bill. This is an embarrassing defeat for Birgitte, who is forced to re-open the budget negotiations. At the same time, it becomes ever more obvious that Birgitte will have to find a new media adviser to replace Kasper Juul, whom she fired: Michael Laugesen has become the new editor-in-chief of the Express, and has immediately begun a smear campaign against Birgitte. Birgitte acts swiftly and hires Tore Gudme, who is an associate professor in Rhetoric, and a handsome young man.

Katrine Fønsmark is offered the greatest journalistic scoop of her career when she is contacted by an anonymous source in the Defence Intelligence Service. He shows her pictures of CIA detainees leaving an aircraft at Thule Air Base in Greenland – proof that the US has conducted prisoner renditions on Danish soil! The revelations come at a very bad time for Birgitte, who has now been in office for almost 100 days and therefore needs a positive story or some concrete political results. Instead, she now has to clean up a case from the previous government. But it quickly dawns upon her that violations of Greenlandic territory are nothing new – from the Danish colonisation 300 years ago to the stationing of US nuclear weapons there during the Cold War, and prisoner transports after 9-11. No Danish prime minister has ever apologised for any of it. Birgitte wants to take action, but she is persuaded to hush the matter up by Kasper Juul and her cabinet ministers – who in Birgitte's opinion are already beginning to think and act more and more like the old government.

Together with her Minister of Economic Affairs – the highly educated, intelligent and very beautiful Henriette Klitgaard – Birgitte introduces a historic bill, under which it will be compulsory for the boards of Danish companies to have 50% women members. The controversial proposal is not exactly given an enthusiastic welcome in the government ranks. Bent Sejrø fears the reaction of the biggest companies, who are strongly opposed to gender quotas – mostly because they have almost no women on their boards. Pernille Madsen of the Labour Party, Birgitte's Minister of Social Affairs and Gender Equality, is also dissatisfied: she is aggrieved because Birgitte has chosen to bypass her and introduce the bill via the Minister of Economic Affairs. Pernille Madsen threatens to create unrest in the government unless Birgitte promises her access to all meetings and a place first in the queue to the government's powerful co-ordinating committee, the C-committee. Katrine still hasn't got over the death of Ole Dahl. She torments herself with too much exercise, too little sleep and unhealthy food. Her indoor cycling instructor, Benjamin, notices this and offers to help. Katrine rejects him – she cannot cope with more men in her life – and especially not when it is becoming increasingly clear that Kasper still has feelings for her.

The president of the former Soviet state of Turgisia, Alexander Grozin, is making a state visit to Denmark to take over the chairmanship of the international Organisation for Security, Democracy and Development, the OSDD. At the same time, it is announced that Turgisia intends to invest one billion euros in Danish wind turbine technology, thereby opening up the possibility of a Danish exports adventure in the former eastern bloc. However, one thing that Birgitte Nyborg could do without is the fact that the Turgisian poet and dissident Vladimir Bayanov has arrived in Copenhagen at the same time as Grozin. The two are mortal enemies; Grozin regards Bayanov as a terrorist, while Bayanov views Grozin as an undemocratic tyrant.