The Danish centre-left aped the far right to win an election. There’s a better way to deal with people’s fears
I wasn’t much of a connoisseur, I admit, in the matter of Nordic cultural differences before I moved to Sweden from Turkey in 2011. Narcissism of minor differences, I’d always thought, complacent in my half-baked knowledge of Viking history and Norse mythology. It took me several years and two seasons of The Bridge (Bron/Broen), the riveting Scandi-noir TV crime series, to realise that the Danes and the Swedes neither resemble nor necessarily like each other.
At first I felt closer to Martin Rohde, the Danish police detective in the series who has to work with his Swedish counterpart, Saga Norén, after a corpse is discovered exactly in the middle of the Øresund Bridge which connects the two countries. Like him, I was enthralled by the Swedes’ tendency to follow rules to the letter, their passionate upholding of all forms of equality and, above all, their concurrent devotion to a paternalistic state and individualism. Norén’s character, brilliantly played by Sofia Helin, has, it was suggested, some form of Asperger syndrome. But in reality it isn’t odd for Swedish women to buy drinks for men in a bar, to be acerbic about intimate relationships and children, or indeed to get changed in the office.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MTqT9I
