Jacob Christensen

How do we interpret this politically: On Saturday evening, the three parties still negotiating the final agreement on the Danish budget announced that they would be taking a break in the negotiations so that they could go home and watch the screening of an episode in the TV series “Matador”.

Matador – incidentally the Danish name for the game which is internationally known as Monopoly – is a series originally screened around 1980 and covering the social developments in a Danish provincial town (most likely the author Lise Nørgaard’s home town Roskilde) between 1929 and 1948.

The series has achieved an iconic status in Danish TV history – partly because of the quality of the acting, partly because it shows Denmark in “the good old days” (no explicit sex, no drugs, no rock’n'roll, no prefab estates – and especially no Muslims) – and has been repeated a seemingly endless number of times during the last 20 years. It is also available on DVD.

So, the question arises: Why would politicians pause negotiations in order to see an episode that they are likely to have on DVD already?

Symbolic politics are suspected.

This should be a much longer post but for a number of reasons – lack of time and creativity – my thoughts wouldn’t merge into a readable text.

But here are some of my main points:

• Finance is a special portfolio because of the coodinating tasks – this makes it a powerfull but also potentially dangerous portfolio
• Finance is usually not a good stepping stone in a political career: It’s not unusual that Finance Ministers who have gone on to become party and/or government leaders have been disasters (Helmut Schmidt is the only good exception that I can think of right now)
• If you look at Denmark and Sweden during the last 25 years, success in government has rested on a close cooperation between the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance Ministry – in some cases (notably Denmark 1993-2001 but also earlier during Schlüter’s term in office) the FM has been in the lead with regard to policy development, in other cases (notably Denmark 2001-today) the initiative has been with the PMO
• Finance could be seen as a staff rather than a line portfolio in modern governments, a strong PM would want close control of the FM
• Anders Borg fits the bill for a staff officer
• The question is: Does this mean that Fredrik Reinfeldt will be as dominant as Prime Minister in the present Swedish government as Göran Persson was in the previous (interesting because we have the single party/coalition and minority/majority parametres to consider) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen in the present Danish government (minority coalition but with a much weaker partner).

I would like to note that I was inspired by Susanne Hegelund and Peter Mose’s observations in their book Håndbog for statsministre which points in the same direction as recent comparative research into the role of the prime minister. Also: Nicholas Aylott’s book chapter “‘President Persson’ – How Did Sweden Get Him?” (in Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (eds), The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies).

PS: I know that I at one time promised a review of Håndbog for statsministre – but, but, but… [enter bad excuse here]