At the gates of her final year as president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen keeps silent about her plans and responds with a polite no-now (“I have not decided anything”, “it is not yet time”) every time he is asked if he aspires to continue one more term.
Information coming 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 outcome of the European elections will be, is how to manage this ambition and whether or not the Spitzenkandidaten system by which parties elect candidates to chair the Commission, brutally ignored by Council leaders in 2019, will be resumed. Brussels is an anthill of rumours, intrigues and calculations, but those around it say that it will take it easy and will not pronounce itself until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Von der Leyen lets himself be loved. Installed in a tiny study next to her office in Berlaymont, the Commission's headquarters, you have to imagine her reading with a smile the almost hagiographic profiles that the European press, specifically Anglo-Saxon, has recently published in the time to take stock of your mandate. Or contemplating, without flinching, the likely failed attempt by her rivals in her political family, the Party (PPE), to remove her from the middle in the face of the distribution of positions in 2024.
Europe, capital Von der Leyen. The hesitations of its beginnings seem today a distant memory. He has had slips, but he got up gracefully. With its centralizing style of leadership – personalist even, useful in crisis situations although prone to tensions – the German has become the face of Europe, the phone number the world has to call to call if you want to talk to the EU. She has been the face of the joint purchase plan for vaccines against covid. Also the promoter and ambassador in the capitals of the most important European aid plan ever adopted, the Next Generation EU fund. With the war, he has pushed forward ten packages of sanctions against Russia, maintaining unity, while boosting Europe's defense.
"In historical terms, under his leadership, not only has a crisis been managed but it has been responded to 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 Affairs. "Other presidents have managed crises, but they have not come out with great progress in European construction. With Von der Leyen, qualitative leaps have been created. I would definitely put her among the builders of Europe", says Laya, who points out certain shadows in her way of leading.
Von der Leyen's personalist style, he continues, 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). "It has failed here, 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, this personalization has been a shame". In the words of a diplomat: "Von der Leyen has challenged his commissioners".
Beyond these criticisms, which are frequent among civil servants and in the offices of the commissioners, in political terms the balance sheet of this Commission is excellent, especially for the progressives. "Von der Leyen is the best president of the Commission since Jacques Delors", says MEP Philippe Lamberts, ex-leader of the Greens, without the slightest doubt. In 2019 she voted against her candidacy in protest at how she had been appointed (Angela Merkel and Macron pulled her out of her sleeve at the last minute) and her lack of credentials on a key issue for her group, the fight against climate change. Von der Leyen was then Minister of Defense in Germany.
"They asked us to make an act 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, even though it has some holes, the Commission has been ambitious in terms of ecology", admits Lamberts. "Von der Leyen had two opportunities to put it in the freezer, the pandemic and the war, and he has not done it, even though it is the solution that the PPE is providing him".
"He has fulfilled", agrees Iratxe García, president of the European Socialists in the Eurochamber, who considers that many requests made to him before the crucial confirmation vote in July 2019, which he won by only nine votes, have been met. "There are some of the requests that have been launched," he says about the Green Pact proposals, the minimum wage and the directive on gender violence. "This 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 push them forward".
In many key measures of the Green Deal, such as the regulation on combustion engines, the European people have nevertheless voted divided or even against the initiatives of the Commission. "These proposals have the potential to ruin the middle classes", protest EPP sources, who consider that the Von der Leyen Commission's initiatives in this area are "clearly tilted towards 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 has to negotiate in the Council with many prime ministers who are not from her group. Perhaps it is something that they are not yet aware of, but the reality is this", affirms the head of the European Socialists in the Eurochamber. "The PPE cannot understand how it is that with a popular president in the EC we can have before us one of the most progressive legislatures of recent times", adds Ernest Urtasun (ECP, Greens), who believes that Von der Leyen has acted "conditioned by context of the pandemic and due to the strong winds of change in the US in economic policy".
Under this background of ideological differences, the head of the ranks of the PP in the Eurochamber, the German Manfred Weber (also president of the party and its candidate, failed, in the European elections of 2019) has maneuvered to promote internal primaries in order to elect their candidate for the European Commission. His alternative would be the Maltese Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, with a political DNA that is considered closer to the postulates of the EPP than that of Von der Leyen, with more social accents.
The discomfort of the CDU with these movements, as well as the rejection of their approaches to parties to the right of the EPP or directly to the ultra-right (Weber endorsed the alliance of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia with Giorgia Meloni and the Northern League) led the German conservative party two weeks ago to stop these maneuvers to announce their support for Von der Leyen to repeat. His reluctance to enter the campaign game raises suspicions in the EPP, whose summits he barely attends. "She wants to be anointed", like in 2019, they protest from the party.
Another element to consider is the change in the political landscape. Italy was just the beginning. The legislative elections held in Sweden and Finland, which have also concluded with government agreements between EPP and far-right parties, indicate that the European map is changing. Why can't what is done on a national scale be done in Europe?, ask the leadership of the EPP. This strategy has given two of its most important delegations, the Polish and the Romanian, the right to war, which refuse to merge with ECR, the group in which Vox is active. 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 Eurochamber with the help of the liberals to dispense with the social democrats. "It will be necessary to see under what conditions Von der Leyen is elected" for a second term, warn popular European sources. "Because if it's with a center-right majority, it has to give a blow to the Commission's policies."
