On the threshold of her last working year as president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen remains silent about her plans, responding with a polite no-nonsense (“I haven't decided anything”, “It's not the time yet”) every time. that he is asked if he aspires to continue one more mandate.
Information from Paris and Berlin indicates that the German conservative has already discussed the issue with Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, and her intention is to run. The question, apart from what the result of the European elections will be, is how to manage that ambition and whether or not to resume the system of spitzenkandidaten by which parties choose candidates to chair the Commission, brutally ignored by Council leaders in the 2019. Brussels is abuzz with rumours, intrigues and calculations, but people around him say that he will take it easy and will not speak until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Von der Leyen lets himself be loved. Installed in a tiny studio next to her office at the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the Commission, one can imagine her reading with a smile the almost hagiographic profiles recently published by the European press, Anglo-Saxon in particular, when taking stock of her mandate. Or contemplating, without her splashing herself, the probably failed attempt by her rivals in her political family, the European People's Party (EPP), to get her out of the way in the face of the 2024 distribution of positions.
Europe, capital Von der Leyen. The hesitations of its beginnings seem today a distant memory. He has had skids, but has gotten up gracefully. With her centralizing leadership style –personalist even, useful in crisis situations, although prone to tensions–, the German has become the face of Europe, the phone number the world should call if it wants to talk to the EU . She has been the face of the covid vaccine joint purchase plan. She is also the promoter and ambassador in the capitals of the largest European aid plan ever adopted, the Next Generation EU fund. With the war, she has carried out ten packages of sanctions against Russia and has maintained unity, while promoting the Europe of defense.
"In historical terms, under his leadership, not only has a crisis been managed, but a response has been given through more European construction," says Arancha González Laya, dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po University and former minister of Foreign. “Other presidents have managed crises, but they have not come out of them with great advances in the European construction. With Von der Leyen, qualitative leaps have been made. I would put her among the builders of Europe, ”says Laya, who points out certain shadows in her way of leading.
Von der Leyen's personalistic style has highlighted dysfunctions in the definition of the roles of the President of the Commission, the President of the European Council (Charles Michel) and the High Representative for Foreign Policy (Josep Borrell). “There it has failed, and I also believe that centralization has not allowed the Commission to deploy all its voices. At a time when the EU must be everywhere and the Commission wants to be geopolitical, that personalization has been a drag." In the words of one diplomat: "Von der Leyen has dwarfed her commissioners."
Beyond these criticisms, frequent among civil servants and in the cabinets of the commissioners, in political terms the balance of this Commission is outstanding, especially for progressives. "Von der Leyen is the best president of the Commission since Jacques Delors," says Philippe Lamberts MEP, former leader of the Greens, without an iota of doubt. In 2019, he voted against her candidacy in protest of how she had been appointed (Angela Merkel and Macron pulled it out of their sleeve at the last minute) and her lack of credentials on a key issue for her group, the fight against change. climate. Von der Leyen was then Germany's defense minister.
“They asked us to make a leap of faith. It was very difficult to give him a blank check, but it must be recognized that, for the first time, with the Green Pact, although it has some holes, the Commission has been ambitious on an ecological level”, admits Lamberts. "Von der Leyen had two occasions to put him in the freezer, the pandemic and the war, and he has not done it, despite the fact that it is the solution that the PPE is facilitating."
“He has complied,” says Iratxe García, president of the European socialists in the European Parliament, who considers many requests that were made to him before the crucial confirmation vote in July 2019, which he won by only 9 votes, fulfilled. "There is a part of the petitions that have been launched," she says of the proposals on the Green Pact, the minimum wage and the directive on gender violence. “That does not mean that the final result is adequate, many things are missing from the social pillar. But she has complied and we have worked with the main political forces, including the EPP, to move them forward.
In many key measures of the Green Deal, such as the rule on combustion engines, the popular Europeans have, however, voted divided or even against the Commission's initiatives. "These proposals have the potential to ruin the middle classes," protest EPP sources, who consider that the initiatives of the Von der Leyen Commission in this field are "clearly tilted to the left and environmentalists."
García (PSOE) has another explanation. “What they don't understand is that the EPP has lost many governments since 2019 and that Von der Leyen must negotiate in the Council with many prime ministers who are not from his group. Perhaps it is something that they are not yet aware of, but the reality is that ”, points out the head of the European socialists in the Eurochamber. "In the EPP they cannot understand how with a popular president in the EC we can be before one of the most progressive legislatures in recent times," adds Ernest Urtasun (ECP, Greens), who believes that Von der Leyen has acted "conditioned by the context of the pandemic and the strong winds of change in the US in economic policy”.
Against this background of ideological divergences, the leader of the PP in the European Parliament, the German Manfred Weber (also president of the party and its candidate, failed, in the 2019 European elections) has maneuvered to promote internal primaries to choose his candidate to the EC. His alternative would be the Maltese Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, whose political DNA is considered closer to the postulates of the EPP than that of Von der Leyen, with more social accents.
The CDU's discomfort with these movements, as well as the rejection of its approaches to parties to the right of the EPP or directly to the extreme right (Weber endorsed the alliance of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia with Giorgia Meloni and the Northern League), led two weeks for the German conservative party to stop these maneuvers by announcing its support for Von der Leyen to repeat. His reluctance to lend himself to the campaign game arouses misgivings in the PPE, whose summits he hardly frequents. "She wants to be anointed", as in 2019, they protest in the party.
Another element to take into account is the change in the political landscape. Italy was just the beginning. The legislative elections held in Sweden and Finland, which have resulted in government agreements between the EPP parties and the extreme right, indicate that the European map is changing. Why is it not going to be possible to do in Europe what is done at the national level?, they ask themselves in the leadership of the PPE. This strategy has put two of its largest delegations, the Polish and the Romanian, on a war footing, which refuse to merge with ECR, the group where Vox militates. Thus, the EPP thinks rather of forming "strategic alliances" with parties to its right, in a broad sense, and aspires to form an alternative majority in the European Parliament with the help of the liberals to do without the Social Democrats. "We will have to see under what conditions Von der Leyen is chosen" for a second term, warn popular European sources. "Because if he is with a majority of the center right, he is going to have to give a swerve to the policies of the Commission."
