If you had to design a president of the European Commission from scratch, you might come up with Ursula von der Leyen. She is trilingual in English, German and French; studied in Hanover and London; lived in California; and was a right-hand ministerial colleague of Angela Merkel in Berlin. She was even born in Brussels, the daughter of a founding Eurocrat.
But therein lies her Achilles’s heel. Von der Leyen got into politics following in the footsteps of her father, a power broker in Germany’s dominant centre-right Christian Democratic Union party; but, for all her connections, experience and ambition, high-level political talent has never been evident. She is Europe’s Hillary Clinton. And, of late, her extraordinary bungling over vaccines and the Irish border has tarnished the European Commission and could come to damage the standing of the EU as a whole.
Down the ages, nepotism has more often benefitted mediocre men than mediocre women: in elective politics alone, George W Bush and Rajiv Gandhi spring to mind as lesser copies of their father and mother respectively. But von der Leyen’s mode of entry into a male-dominated political world creates a parallel with Clinton who, as the failed presidential candidate put it in her memoirs, had a “20-year career in government as first lady, senator and secretary of state.” At the crunch Clinton couldn’t get herself elected to the top job, failing at different stages in 2008 and 2016.
Von der Leyen is the first female Commission president, after 12 men. But the crucial difference with Clinton is that she didn’t have to be elected by the people—she was simply appointed, then confirmed by a wafer-thin majority in a European parliament presented with no alternative. “She was pulled like a rabbit out of a hat,” in the words of Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s liberal Free Democrat party.
Von der Leyen’s shortcomings are encouraging the “other” EU president—European Council president Charles Michel, a former prime minister of Belgium—to assert himself at her expense. Since the inception of a separate Council president in 2009, that job had been more chair than chief executive—specifically, presiding over sessions of EU heads of government. Michel, however, has bigger ideas. This is the significance of “sofagate,” the now iconic meeting of the two EU presidents with President Erdoan on 7th April. In front of the world’s cameras, Michel made a beeline for the gilded chair next to the Turkish leader, relegating von der Leyen to a distant sofa. “I felt hurt, and I felt alone, as a woman,” she said. But as one EU ambassador said to me: “I don’t think Angela Merkel would have gone to the sofa.”
To understand Ursula von der Leyen and her impact on contemporary European leadership, you need to start with her late father, Ernst Albrecht.
“In Brussels, von der Leyen is becoming a byword for misjudgments under pressure”
The Albrechts were princelings of Europe: a great north German Hanseatic dynasty with ancestors from assorted European aristocracies, whose members were cotton merchants, doctors and royal diplomats. Born in 1930, Ernst just avoided fighting in Hitler’s war but he experienced its full devastation. He studied law and economics first in Tübingen in southern Germany and then, more significant in raising his sights, at Cornell University in New York (one of his grandmothers came from a prominent plantation-owning family in South Carolina). Ernst was determined to become an architect not only of a new Germany but a new Europe. Hence his master’s thesis at the University of Bonn, the capital of Konrad Adenauer’s new Federal Republic of Germany: “Is monetary union a prerequisite for economic union?”
Soon a protégé of Adenauer’s circle, Ernst was appointed one of Germany’s founding officials in the European Commission while he was in his mid-20s. In an iconic photograph of the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957, he is standing directly behind Adenauer. Ursula, the eldest daughter among his seven children, was born in Brussels the following year and went to its international school. (A few years later, in the mid 1970s, Boris Johnson did a pre-Eton spell there.)
Ernst’s last job in Brussels, head of competition policy, was a principal construction site of today’s EU. He left it in 1970 to forge a political career in his native Lower Saxony, the northwest German state that borders the Netherlands. Double-hatting for a few years as a CDU member of Lower Saxony’s state parliament while chairing a food company—a talent for publicity earned him the nickname “cookie monster”—he soon held the highest position in the state: minister president. He put himself forward as a candidate for chancellor in 1980 but lost and, in any case, the centre-right did not prevail that year. When it was back in government in 1982, Helmut Kohl was in charge, but Ernst remained in the party’s higher echelons even after losing the 1990 Lower Saxony state election to Gerhard Schröder, the charismatic SPD leader who went on to succeed Kohl as chancellor.
So, while he did a succession of big jobs, Ernst never made it to the very top. His chances were not helped by successive political scandals during his 14 years running Lower Saxony. But he didn’t fail in his youthful ambitions. Under Adenauer, Brandt and Kohl, he was a proud and successful pioneer of today’s democratic Germany within a democratic European Union, powerfully allied to the United States.
Ursula, Ernst’s favourite child, imbibed it all—and was to replay it all, including the scandals. When the CDU won back Lower Saxony in 2003, the new minister president, Christian Wulff, was a protégé of Ernst’s. Ernst even appeared at Wulff’s first cabinet meeting, in a kind of laying on of hands, with his daughter present.
But that is getting ahead of the Albrecht story. Teenage Ursula started down a similar academic route to her father—law and economics at Göttingen. At that time, the far-left militant group Red Army Faction was targetting the families of German politicians, and for her safety Ursula switched to the London School of Economics, studying under an assumed name. Returning to Hanover to study medicine, she pursued a doctorate on “births in warm water baths” (later the subject of a controversy over plagiarism, which she narrowly survived). She met Heiko von der Leyen, a German physician from an aristocratic family of silk merchants, and they married in 1986. An almost exact replica of family Albrecht, they now have seven children. The von der Leyens went to America—as Ernst had done—when Heiko got an academic post at Stanford University, and they lived there for four years.
When they returned to Hanover in 1996, Ursula, now in her late thirties, launched into politics in Ernst’s Lower Saxony fiefdom. By the early 2000s the political pendulum in the state was swinging away from Schröder’s Social Democrats and Christian Wulff needed a prominent woman in his team for the upcoming state election. Who better than the immaculate daughter of Ernst, summed up by her debut at a national CDU conference in which the totality of her speech was: “My name is Ursula von der Leyen, I am social minister in Lower Saxony. My husband and I have seven children.”
Ursula took up the brand that Ernst had launched. Back then, “The new Landesvater with his happy family” had been the theme of one televised profile of the “father of the state,” with Ursula and one of her brothers singing songs to him like the von Trapps. Twenty years on, her first campaign slogan was: “The future starts at home.” There was national media coverage of Ursula and her family, including one famous photo with mother and twin daughters feeding baby lambs with a bottle. It was image magic for the staid and male CDU and it caught the eye of Angela Merkel, the new leader of the CDU, after the agonising disgrace and political demise of Helmut Kohl.
“Her publicisation of her family is too much for some,” write von der Leyen’s biographers Ulrike Demmer and Daniel Goffart. But it wasn’t too much for Merkel, who badly needed other female faces in her CDU line-up, especially one who, unlike her, was a mother with west German roots. So in 2005, after Merkel narrowly defeated Schröder, the “social minister from Lower Saxony with seven children” took up the same job at federal level in Berlin; and there she stayed, later as labour and then defence minister, becoming Merkel’s longest-serving cabinet minister until her elevation to Brussels two years ago.
Von der Leyen was a star of the early Merkel era. With an inherited touch for pragmatic CDU centrism, she was presented as a new force—a female one—of smooth, reassuring competence. This worked best on her home territory of social policy, exemplifying the Heimat and happy nuclear families beloved of Germany’s Christian right.
“I turned into the family policy I did,” she told Charlie Rose, the US talk show host. Classic von der Leyen was her campaign to curb child sexual abuse imagery on the internet. Her policy changes were modest but nonetheless made big waves in the media, sparking a typically German controversy about censorship, and giving her the nickname “Zensursula” (Zensur is the German word for censor). More generally, her policies amounted to incremental, overdue improvements in support for Germany’s new generation of working women, marred by botched schemes for hot school lunches and extra nurseries—and welfare cuts affecting poorer women. Hard-up families didn’t feature in those photoshoots with lambs.
“To survive in politics for 20 years, you need stamina and friends—and von der Leyen has plenty of both”
In positioning, it was of a piece with Hillary Clinton’s use of the African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child,” which she adapted for the title of the 1996 book she used to signal her independent political launch. Both women sought to use social policy to break through the “glass ceiling.” And indeed, both did break out: Hillary became Obama’s secretary of state; von der Leyen, defence minister in Merkel’s third term. However, as they rose higher, insufficient political skill became their real glass ceiling. Perhaps because, in both cases, their rise wasn’t purely meritocratic—in contrast to Margaret Thatcher and Merkel, who, before them, went through not just the glass ceiling but also the roof.
At the German defence ministry, a faltering von der Leyen soon lost any prospect of succeeding Merkel. Her career seemed all but over, until she was plucked by EU heads of government for Commission president in the last-minute horse-trading of top EU jobs two years ago.
Von der Leyen got the job largely because of who she wasn’t: namely, one of the three candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) promoted by the main party groups in the European parliament, none of whom had enough support in either the European Council or the parliament itself. In different ways they were all, in Vatican terms, non-papabile—too forthright for the top job, at least for the taste of President Macron in France and the eastern European premiers, Hungary’s authoritarian Viktor Orbán in particular. And once France’s Christine Lagarde had been nominated to succeed Mario Draghi as president of the European Central Bank, a German also fitted the power-balancing “grid.”
A constant problem with von der Leyen is style over substance. In nearly 20 continuous years in government, there have been neat media launches and soundbites at every turn. As defence minister she even coined a slogan for reforming the German army, “Activ, Attraktiv, Anders” (“active, attractive, different”), with a trademark plan for better living conditions and family support for soldiers. Some of this modernisation was necessary, but the execution was botched, and military leaders mocked that triple-A strapline as a “slogan for IBM.”
When attacked, she exhibits what Robert Birnbaum, a longstanding observer at Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, calls a “glassy brittleness.” “She is self-disciplined and over-perfect in all aspects of presentation and doesn’t like to admit mistakes in public or even reflect on them.” Equally brittle is her tight-knit personal team. Jens Flosdorff, her media manager, has been with her since her social minister days in Hanover.
In Brussels, von der Leyen is becoming a byword for misjudgments under pressure—threatening Northern Ireland with a hard border to stop vaccine exports from the EU, despite Michel Barnier’s three long years of negotiations to guarantee that such a border was avoided, and then blaming the vaccine companies and even the EU’s trade commissioner for procurement mistakes that were equally her fault. But those who know von der Leyen’s backstory, familiar as they are with her habit of passing the buck, are less shocked. As defence minister, when faced with a scandal of right-wing extremism in parts of the German army or Bundeswehr, she blamed the generals. “The Bundeswehr has an attitude problem, and it appears to have weak leadership at various levels,” she announced, to a predictably enraged top brass. Exorbitant fees paid to consultants to reshape the German military, as a means of sidestepping existing officialdom, provoked a huge storm. When auditors revealed shady procurement, she declared that mistakes had been made “far below my level.”
Von der Leyen’s statement to Le Monde on 1st February, as the EU’s vaccine failure swept the media, is a classic: “Some countries [ie the US and Britain] resorted to emergency, 24-hour marketing authorisation procedures. The Commission and the member states agreed not to compromise with the safety and efficacy requirements for the authorisation of the vaccine. Time had to be taken to analyse the data, which, even minimised, takes three to four weeks. So, yes, Europe left it later, but it was the right decision. I remind you that a vaccine is the injection of an active biological substance into a healthy body. We are talking about a mass vaccination here; it is a gigantic responsibility.”
Every one of those assertions is wrong, complacent, contested, or all three. Taken together, it is a breathtakingly misplaced argument that, in a public health emergency, speed is cavalier and dangerous while delay is safe and wise. Had she made such statements before taking the job, she would have been unappointable. “Only the Pope is infallible,” Commission spokesman Eric Mamer said in a press conference defending a boss who, unfortunately, does not seem to agree.
Rarely has an EU president looked more precarious than von der Leyen did in May last year on the 13th floor of the Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters. As the virus continued to wreak havoc, she proclaimed Covid-19 to be “Europe’s moment.” Since then she has reached repeatedly for that clanging phrase, with an almost compulsive weakness for slogans and a general lack of political touch.
And yet to survive in politics for 20 years, especially with seven children, you need something—particularly stamina and friends, and von der Leyen has plenty of both. For all the controversy, she lasted six years in the German defence ministry and was reappointed by Merkel to a second term, whereas her three predecessors had been forced out early: one over a failed drone programme, another for plagiarism in his doctorate, and the third over civilian deaths from a German airstrike in Afghanistan. Von der Leyen weathered her equivalent of all three. Below the radar, over her six years, she secured a one-third increase in the military budget, thanks partly to a strong rapport with Wolfgang Schäuble, the veteran CDU finance minister.
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She has none of the lethargy or isolation of the one and only Commission president to be forced out early—Jacques Santer, sacked for administrative cock-ups. Rumours of her political demise are almost certainly exaggerated.
The significant question about von der Leyen is not whether she will survive, but what she signifies about leadership in today’s EU. In particular, why did Macron promote her, while the leader who knew her best—Merkel—temporised before only reluctantly acquiescing in the final stages of the 2019 horse-trading?
Von der Leyen had real attraction for Macron not only for what she wasn’t but also for what she was: a consensual and supremely Euro-networked German straight out of Merkel’s governing Berlin; a woman in an era committed to equality; a pragmatic but determined pro-European, who—like her father—is also strongly pro-American.
This mix suits the Biden times—and also Paris. She supports Nato while, like Macron, pushing for a greater defence capability for the EU. The one occasion I have met her was at a US-European forum, where this was her theme. It was from defence discussions with von der Leyen, in French, that Macron lighted on her as a possible Commission president. “He liked the style, even if there wasn’t much substance,” says a French diplomat. “He intended to provide the substance.” Macron also saw von der Leyen as an instrument for tying Germany into new European projects acceptable to France.
Conversely, this is partly why Merkel was cool. As a German diplomat put it to me: “Merkel wasn’t wild about any German as president of the Commission, not just von der Leyen. Most of Europe’s problems and Europe’s bills end up in Berlin anyway; she didn’t particularly want a second postbox for sending them to Berlin via a German president who would add some of their own too, plus some special pleading.” There was also the characteristic German worry about seeming too dominant, which is why until von der Leyen there had only been one previous German Commission president: Walter Hallstein, its founding head, for whom Ernst Albrecht worked six decades ago.
In other words, much of the explanation for—and doubts about—her rise are more geopolitical than personal. But now that she is in post, it is her personal geopolitical instincts that are all-important. And on European integration these instincts are—as with the transformational Commission presidents Roy Jenkins in the 1970s and Jacques Delors in the 1980s—just in advance, but not too far, of most of the national leaders of her generation.
Above all, von der Leyen is profoundly German yet profoundly European at the same time. A spiritual daughter of her father’s ideals, she often cites her father’s words to describe the EU’s success: “We are trading with one another again and when countries trade they build up friendships, and friends do not shoot one another.” She adds her own pietistic gloss: “We can count on one another in good times and bad, because we know that we may argue but can make up again, and because we never forget why we entered into the union in the first place.”
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She talks of the EU’s “holy trinity” of peace, prosperity and democracy, and has certainly not given up on the Treaty of Rome’s cause of “ever closer union.” On the contrary, for all the vaccine controversy, the long-term story of the crisis may be that the EU became, in key respects, a health union, and just at the point when it is becoming an environmental union, too, thanks to the climate emergency. The Commission’s €1.8 trillion post-Covid recovery plan may be just the start. “Europe’s moment” may be a spectacularly blundering way to describe a human tragedy, but this disaster—like others before—really will prove to be another of Europe’s turning points. However unlikely it might have felt for most of the last year, and whatever her own inadequacies, the von der Leyen presidency could—almost despite her—yet come to be seen as a phase of European integration as great as the Jenkins-Delors single currency, single market and social chapter.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said of FDR that he had “a second-class mind, first-class temperament, and it’s the temperament that counts.” In the case of Ursula von der Leyen, unusually for a leader, both the mind and the temperament are second rate, and but for her father she probably wouldn’t have got anywhere near the top. But—partly also inherited from him—her European ideals are first rate, and in a European Union which distributes its leadership across so many people and institutions, that may be enough to squeak through.
