Ursula von der Leyen is often hailed as the most transformational president of the European Commission since Jacques Delors. But could her legacy backfire as she seeks re-election?
ADVERTISEMENTThe German politician is ready for another five years at the helm of the European Union's most powerful institution, from which she has shaped the bloc's policies in ways that would have been unimaginable when MEPs elected her in 2019 by a razor-thin margin.
Her tenure kicked off amid a continent-wide movement of protests and strikes that thrust climate change to the very top of the agenda. It was therefore fitting that one of her first headline-grabbing moments was her presentation of the European Green Deal as a "man on the moon" moment.
The Green Deal set out the binding ambition to make the bloc climate-neutral by 2050, an irreversible shift for a borderless single market that traced its origins to a coal and steel community.
Shortly after, her executive plunged into a succession of crises, some lasting to this day.
"I had been in office for less than 100 days when the WHO declared a global pandemic," von der Leyen said during her re-election announcement on Monday, referring to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the entire bloc come to a standstill.
The pandemic was followed by a rise in irregular migration, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the disruption of energy supplies, record-breaking inflation and an across-the-board economic slowdown. But instead of succumbing to external circumstances, the president managed to capitalise on those crises to strengthen and deepen European integration.
Against the virus, von der Leyen spearheaded a history-making €750-billion recovery fund to jolt the bloc's economy after crippling months of paralysis. Months later, she oversaw an unprecedented common procurement of vaccines to ensure all member states had access to the life-saving treatment on equal conditions.
When Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead to invade Ukraine, von der Leyen proposed plans to wean the EU off Russian fossil fuels – a costly vice kept for decades as taboo – and drastically ramp up the deployment of renewables. As a result, the bloc's dependency rate on Russian gas fell from 45% in 2021 to 15% in 2023. Meanwhile, imports of seaborne oil and coal collapsed to zero.
The president then turned the war into the long-missing catalyst that was needed to revive the project of enlargement and recommended the opening of accession talks with Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia-Herzegovina, provided the completion of reforms.
When she saw China double down on its assertiveness and stand by Putin's side, von der Leyen came up with the concept of "de-risking" and drafted the first-ever strategy on economic security, forcing open markets to reckon head-on with geopolitical swings.
On migration, she fought to reform the bloc's asylum policy as she tried an untested, and controversial, method to sign agreements with neighbouring countries, including Tunisia and Mauritania. And on digital, she laid out a brand-new rulebook to rein in unfair competition, unlawful content and the worst effects of artificial intelligence.
All of this elevated von der Leyen's profile, both domestically and internationally, to heights previously unknown to her predecessors. She earned glowing coverage in, among others, the New York Times, the Guardian, Time Magazine and Forbes, which named her the world's most powerful woman for two years in a row.
Inside the Commission, however, her penchant for ambitious policies ruffled feathers among staff, who decried her tendency to micro-manage legislation and take decisions in close consultation with only a very selected, mostly German circle of advisers. Diplomats from member states have complained about what they see as von der Leyen's insistence on dominating the narrative by floating grand ideas in public, which can have the effect of pre-empting the outcome of internal negotiations.
Von der Leyen's icy relationship with Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, has been the subject of endless speculation since the infamous Sofagate scandal in Turkey. Last year, Michel openly chastised the Commission for the way it designed a phased-in ban on Russian oil and the memorandum of understanding with Tunisia.
The tension surfaced again after von der Leyen received blistering criticism for her response to the Israel-Hamas war and Michel attempted to position himself as a moderate force among the diverging views of member states. The debacle from her trip to Tel Aviv resonated for weeks and seriously threatened her standing in Brussels.
Still, the Commission president managed to pull through and shake off her harshest critics. By the time she announced her campaign, no other name thrown in the ring had the gravitas to compete with her. The warm wishes sent by EU leaders bode well for her future.
"The old question of Henry Kissinger of who do you phone when you want to phone Europe? I think, at this point in time, it has an answer," said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), praising how von der Leyen "very successfully" transformed the pandemic and the Ukraine war into policy opportunities.
"There's definitely a story about political leadership," she added. "The flipside to that style is that it has been a very centralised form of leadership which obviously created quite a bit of discontent within the institution itself."
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With no political rival standing between her and the Commission, von der Leyen inevitably becomes her sole adversary. Her legacy, built at a frantic pace in times of extreme urgency, will simultaneously serve as an argument in favour and against her re-election.
It is no coincidence that, as the June elections neared, the political discourse moved to dissect one of her key accomplishments: the Green Deal. Ever since the battle over the Nature Restoration Law, conservative voices, including from von der Leyen's own political family, the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), have ramped up their condemnation of environmental policies which, they say, are constraining industrial production, creating excessive bureaucracy and endangering competitiveness.
The farmers' protests that erupted in January across several European countries only reinforced the right-wing backlash and forced von der Leyen to change her tune, promising "more dialogue" to reconcile climate and agriculture. The scrutiny is set to last until, at least, the June ballot is over and might very well extend into a second presidential term where the economy, defence and high-tech take centre stage.
Faustine Bas-Defossez, director for nature at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), believes the Green Deal must return to its early days, when it was an "ambitious, transformative agenda" with "high-level commitments," before being weakened by the "upcoming European elections and the instrumentalisation of the consequences of the war in Ukraine by some actors, in particular from the agribusiness."
"At a time of fears, eco-anxiety and threats to democracy in several places of the world, we need political courage and hope further down the line," Bas-Defossez told Euronews.
ADVERTISEMENT"The Green Deal remains the only compass we have towards a liveable future. It should therefore remain and get strengthened in the next mandate while putting a new social contract at its core."