Few things like so much in Brussels as pooling on future appointments at the top of the community institutions. After two terms at the helm of the European Commission's Competition portfolio, the fate of Margrethe Vestager, the closest thing to a celebrity that has emerged in the European bubble, has long been the subject of speculation. Shortly before the summer break, the Dane took everyone out of doubt about her next move. “I am pleased that the Danish government has submitted my name for scrutiny as a possible candidate” for the post of president of the European Investment Bank (EIB), she announced in June.
In autumn, it is time to take over from the German Werner Hoyer at the head of the financial institution, and the Danish woman, due to her career, charisma and communication skills, immediately emerged as a formidable rival for candidates such as the former Italian minister Daniele Franco. Born in 1968 in Glostrup, a Danish town of 20,000 inhabitants, Vestager is the daughter of Lutheran Protestant pastors and a descendant of one of the founders of the party in which she has been a member since her youth, Radikal Venstra, of liberal ideology despite his name (Left Radical). She graduated in Economics, in 1998, at just 30 years old, she was appointed Minister of Religious Affairs. A decade later, she was the leader of her party in parliament.
In 2011, under his leadership, the Liberals achieved their best electoral result in years, entering the coalition government of Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Vestager was Minister of the Interior and the Economy and carved out a powerful profile of her own within the executive, placing herself at the center of the most political negotiations, such as a controversial cut in social assistance that seriously confronted her with the unions. A faithful ally of Berlin in the toughest phase of the euro crisis, Vestager arrived in Brussels in 2014 preceded by the rumor, true, that she, and not the Danish prime minister, was the character who inspired the Borgen series.
Her charisma, her communication skills and the high profile of the dossiers she managed (Google, Alstom, Facebook...) made her in a short time one of the brightest stars in the community political firmament. Vestager finished off numerous cases that Joaquín Almunia had left open and communicated them to the general public with efficiency and transparency. She was respected. Donald Trump said of her that he "hated" the US for her firmness against big technology. Although she had the backing of Emmanuel Macron, in 2020 Vestager saw her ambitions to chair the Commission frustrated but convinced the Danish government to keep her in Brussels as commissioner, although her party was no longer in power, an agreement that reaffirmed her reputation for fine strategist. She retained the Competition portfolio and was elevated to vice president, but her second term has been far less spectacular than her first.
Beyond the fact that the courts have annulled some of its most famous decisions, such as the fine to Apple for its dealings with Ireland (instead, they have validated its fine of 4,100 million to Google, the largest imposed by the EU), its role has He was left very sidelined in Ursula von der Leyen's team. The EU's response to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine has been based on a historic relaxation of the rules on public aid, a political scenario in which its role as competition policeman has been blurred.
With a year to go in his term, it was clear that Vestager would make a move soon. His belonging to the liberal family was an obstacle to his attempt to chair the Commission. Coming from a small country, on the other hand, does not have to be a problem to lead the EIB. "Denmark could not have made a better choice," was immediately congratulated by her French colleague Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market and, according to some pools, Vestager's possible successor in Competition. But the idyll between the Danish woman and Paris, key to her election, went awry in July with the appointment of Fiona Scott-Morton, an American, as chief economist of the Commission's Competition Directorate General. Although the rest of the countries did not blink an eye, France was furious with Vestager, who defended his decision tooth and nail in a stormy appearance before the European Parliament. After Macron himself intervened in the controversy, Scott-Morton submitted her resignation to Vestager, who accepted it "with great regret". The last pools of the summer were divided on the extent to which this controversy will take its toll on her candidacy for the EIB.
