After five years of overseeing creeping digital censorship, corruption, economic decline, war and institutional support for genocide, Von der Leyen has been given five more years to do more of the same, or worse.
In late October, I posited that the walls may finally be closing in on EU President Ursula von der Leyen. The lawsuits and investigations against the Pfizergate scandal were piling up and hundreds of EU officials had publicly denounced her one-sided support for Israel as the IDF began the task of ethnically cleansing roughly 2.1 million Gazan citizens. As Politico EUROPE reported, in doing so, she had breached her mandate as EU Commission president, leaving EU capitals “fum[ing]” at “Queen” Ursula’s go-it alone approach to EU foreign policy.
At the time, Von der Leyen (or VDL, as I shall henceforth refer to her) had not yet announced her attention to stand for reelection. It seemed, at least to this humble blogger’s eyes, that her unabashed support for Israel’s blatant war crimes in the early months of its invasion of Gaza would end up proving to be the final straw for her scandal-tarnished presidency.
As I noted in that piece, even if VDL did lose her job or was prevented from standing for a second term, her rare talent for failing upwards would ensure that she would land a new one that was at least as good, if not better — such as, say, NATO chief.
I was wrong on both counts. The top job at NATO HQ has been handed to Dutch premier Mark Rutte. And not only did VdL not lose her job as EU Commission president, she just got reelected — with a much larger margin than first time round. Which goes to show that a history of blatant corruption, total disregard for basic procedure and whole-hearted support of war crimes, including genocide, are not diqualifiers for the top political job in the European Union.
After five years of overseeing creeping digital censorship, corruption, economic decline, war and support for genocide, VdL has been given five more years to do more of the same, or worse. In total, 401 of the European Parliament’s 720 MEPs voted for VdL to stay on as chair of the European Commission in yesterday’s vote, giving VdL a bigger winning margin than during her first confirmation in 2019. According to Politico EUROP, after hearing the result, VdL “smiled, stood up and patted her hand against her [my insertion: cold, cold] heart.”
So, how did VdL pull this off?
For a start, she was able to count on most of the members of the three mainstream political groups that won a majority of the seats in the European elections last month and supported her in 2019 – her own centre-right European People’s party (188 seats), the Socialists (136), and the liberals of Renew (77). Given the vote for Commission president is secret, it’s impossible to know how many members of these three groupings turned out for VDL. But given the size of her majority, it is safe to assume that most did.
To hedge her bets, VdL also launched a charm offensive with Georgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), which has 78 seats in parliament, and the European Greens (53 seats). While ECR chose to let their 78 members vote freely, the European Greens, reassured by VdL’s apparent renewed commitment to the EU’s climate agenda and her pledge not to work with the far-right Identity and Democracy group, whose members include Italy’s Lega party and the National Rally in France, lent their full support behind her candidacy.
“As part of a 4-party majority, we’ll uphold the EU Green Deal, work on a social Europe for all & protect fundamental rights & the rule of law,” the Greens group said. “The cordon sanitaire against the far-right holds.”
VdL also promised the European Parliament’s pseudo-socialist block that her new Commission will prioritise affordable housing by, among other things, creating a dedicated housing commissioner and revising state aid rules to make it easier for member countries to build homes. In other words, she spread herself as far, wide and thinly as possible, “promising something to everyone,” writes Alberto Alemano in his Guardian article, “Ursula von der Leyen Has Lost Europe’s Trust. She Doesn’t Deserve a Second Term”:
[A]ll these groups, including those within her majority, have in the meantime formulated a range of demands that are difficult to reconcile. The Greens want a strong commitment on environmental policies, the EPP want her to revoke the EU’s 2035 ban on internal combustion engine-powered cars, the liberals want to cut red tape and Meloni wants more restrictive migration management.
As a result, von der Leyen has been spreading herself too thinly, promising something to everyone but not fully satisfying anyone. This political ambivalence is deliberate and tactical, but it may have damaged her support in the parliament and compromised her chances of re-election.
That didn’t happen. On the contrary, VdL secured a much more comfortable majority than last time. Of course, if the Commission President was actually elected by politically engaged, well-informed EU citizens — as opposed to being selected for the role by national EU leaders after weeks of backroom horse-trading and then presented to the European Parliament to seal the deal — VdL wouldn’t have a hope in hell of reelection, but that’s not how the EU works.
Assuming VdL makes it to the end of her second term, which is far from a given considering the pressures building in the EU as well as all the court cases and investigations she still faces), what does her reelection bode for the EU’s roughly 450 million citizens? Put simply, lots more bad things…
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Nick Corbishley 