New Commission president has more going for her than her critics admit.
She was elected Commission president with a wafer-thin majority — the lowest margin in the office’s history. She’s in political trouble back home, where the German parliament is investigating allegations of mismanagement. Her very nomination was a last-minute compromise among EU leaders after the front-runners failed to clinch the support of the European Parliament or the European Council.
And yet, Ursula von der Leyen will likely be more powerful and effective than many of her critics suspect.
That she’s German and a member of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) certainly won’t hurt. She’ll be able to bank on support from Berlin and the biggest force in Parliament. The trailblazing nature of her presidency and her commitment to a gender-equal Commission will bring goodwill to the table.
And then there’s the fact that she simply presents as fit for the role. At the superficial level in this YouTube and social media age, having an EU president who looks and sounds like she could play the part on television will make a difference when reaching out to ordinary voters across the bloc. In a deeper sense, von der Leyen inspires confidence with her ability to flip effortlessly between languages and between the topics that inspire passions across the political spectrum.
She was elected Commission president with a wafer-thin majority — the lowest margin in the office’s history. She’s in political trouble back home, where the German parliament is investigating allegations of mismanagement. Her very nomination was a last-minute compromise among EU leaders after the front-runners failed to clinch the support of the European Parliament or the European Council.
And yet, Ursula von der Leyen will likely be more powerful and effective than many of her critics suspect.
She may have had to work to win support of enough MEPs to get the job, but she already has something much more important: the strong backing of the EU’s national leaders, including the French president and German chancellor.
That she’s German and a member of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) certainly won’t hurt. She’ll be able to bank on support from Berlin and the biggest force in Parliament. The trailblazing nature of her presidency and her commitment to a gender-equal Commission will bring goodwill to the table.
And then there’s the fact that she simply presents as fit for the role. At the superficial level in this YouTube and social media age, having an EU president who looks and sounds like she could play the part on television will make a difference when reaching out to ordinary voters across the bloc. In a deeper sense, von der Leyen inspires confidence with her ability to flip effortlessly between languages and between the topics that inspire passions across the political spectrum.
In her first weeks on the European stage, she has already started to build brand VDL.
It’s not enough for von der Leyen to be a skilled, polished communicator. But coming across as poised and in control is an essential start. This will be an EU leader who can talk to Brexit-affected Britain in a way Jean-Claude Juncker never could.
She also has, we’ve discovered, a compelling (for Brussels) backstory: Raised in the EU capital, a mother of seven who rose to the top of German politics, she also — as she told the Parliament Tuesday — welcomed a teenage Syrian refugee into her home, helping him become fluent in both German and English.
In her first weeks on the European stage, she has already started to build brand VDL (even the acronym has a ring to it) — perhaps no surprise given that she engaged Storymachine, a PR agency independent from the Commission, to launch her new Twitter account.
The knock against von der Leyen is that she’ll be a puppet, beholden to both the Council and the Parliament. But she’s already shown her willingness to challenge the powers that be, bucking the EPP on climate and pushing out EPP-aligned Commission Secretary-General Martin Selmayr ahead of her confirmation vote
While many MEPs resent the way she was dumped on them as a presidential nominee, those frustrations will slowly be washed away by the long-sought prize she brought with her to the table. Parliament now has a way to initiate legislation, thanks to von der Leyen promising to bring forward legislative proposals on topics when requested by a majority of MEPs.
Additionally, unlike Juncker, von der Leyen has shaped her policy agenda in league with MEPs — making a series of promises to Parliament’s liberal, green and Socialist blocs.
Those are the ingredients for a broad base of legislation, which will likely pass with bigger majorities than the nine-vote margin of her election.
Will the fractious Parliament be difficult to handle? Yes, of course. It will now take the support of three, if not four, parties to secure a majority. But that’s not the fault of von der Leyen. “You know that before I was in the game, it was also difficult to find a stable platform majority,” she told reporters Tuesday.
Can she do it? Quite possibly. After all, von der Leyen won herself a majority before Parliament’s four pro-EU groups could manage to agree on that common policy platform. Indeed, she marshaled an impressively broad cast of characters to her
ide: parties as diverse as Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), Italy’s 5Star Movement and the U.K. Labour Party.
To be sure, the new president has debts that her creditors will call to collect.
Chief among them will be the governments of Poland and Hungary: PiS and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz can each claim to have provided the final boost that got her across the finish line. Indeed, in a special televised statement after her election, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki thanked his party’s MEPs, stressing that they had provided the “swing vote” for von der Leyen. “The votes of PiS MEPs turned out to be decisive,” he declared.
The U.K. Labour Party and Liberal Democrats might be tempted to make the same claim when Brexit negotiations get tough. And French President Emmanuel Macron won’t forget his own crucial role in events.
But show me a politician who doesn’t have debts or enemies and I’ll show you a politician who never became Commission president.
José Manuel Barroso never escaped his debts. He too was plucked from nowhere, and limped around under constant pressure either from external crises or the combination of German Chancellor Angel Merkel and France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy.
As for enemies, Juncker was elected over the objections of Orbán and Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron. He was persona non grata in Britain, especially ahead of the Brexit referendum. He also barely showed up in Central and Eastern Europe in the first two years of his presidency, heavily favoring the original six EU countries in his travel schedule.
By comparison, von der Leyen takes on the mantle with a great deal of goodwill.
Even the churlish Greens, who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her, know they can work with her. “The pro-European speech she gave this morning was a positive surprise after the very poor performance in the group meetings last week,” Ska Keller, the party’s co-leader in Parliament, said after von der Leyen’s address to the plenary.
Keller’s co-President Philippe Lamberts struck a slightly more pessimistic tone: “She also had nice words for our group but the substance has not changed since last week. No political decision should be based on a good speech alone.”
Words certainly won’t be enough, as von der Leyen surely knows. But so far words are all she’s had at her disposal. And she’s shown she knows how to use them well
By Ryan Heath
Source: Politico.com 7/18/19
