Meet Europe’s new ‘emperor’, Ursula von der Leyen

How an unelected bureaucrat seized control of the European Union and now dictates the continent’s policy on everything from vaccines to war.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attends an EU-Gulf Cooperation Council roundtable meeting in Brussels, Belgium, October 16, 2024. | Photo Credit: Virginia Mayo

Amid the doleful chorus of Western leaders embellishing the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks with fresh layers of piety, distortion and one-sided sorrow, one voice stands out. Outperforming pretty much every other contender for the title of chief apologist for the Zionist state of Israel—on the day that is fast acquiring sacred overtones—was Europe’s top bureaucrat, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.

In one important respect, Frau von der Leyen is in a category all her own. Unlike US President Joe Biden presiding over a White House candlelight vigil, or UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer reheating his familiar stew of lies (‘beheaded babies’, ‘systematic rape’) in Westminster, or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz yet again equating protest against genocidal Israel with ‘antisemitism’, the EU Commissioner has no democratic standing whatsoever. She is a functionary, an apparatchik, placed in office not by a popular vote but on the say-so of the cabal that is the EU Council of Ministers.  

Even so, she believes she has the right to speak on behalf of an entire continent.

It’s worth recalling the speed with which von der Leyen moved a year ago. Within days of the October 7 attacks she had spirited herself to Israel via an unscheduled trip arranged behind the backs of EU leaders. Once there, she seized the chance to indulge in the most egregious and partisan grandstanding. “This is the most heinous assault against Jews since the Holocaust,” she declared before a jubilant Netanyahu. “We thought this could never happen again, yet it did. In the face of this unspeakable tragedy, there is only one possible response: Europe stands with Israel” (emphasis added).

To judge from her statement one year on, the Iron Commissioner seems to have spent the past 12 months with fingers in ears and eyes wide shut. “There can be no justification for Hamas’ acts of terror,” she intones, once more in the name of Europe. “I condemn once again, and in the strongest possible terms, those barbarous attacks. They brought immense suffering not only upon the people of Israel, but also upon innocent Palestinians.” Of Israeli war crimes, barbarity and readiness to push the world to the brink of generalised conflagration, not a word.

It would require more than one column to track the specifics of von der Leyen’s rise to fame, fortune and continental reach. In simplified form, the story starts with her long stint as a member of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s right-wing administration. Rising steadily up the ranks, in 2013 she was appointed Defence Minister, the first woman in Germany to hold that post. Surviving a potentially career-ending scandal centred on the outsourcing of defence contracts, the savvy politician made the most of her opportunity to court support, both across  Europe and further afield.

Identified as a leading contender to succeed Merkel as Chancellor, and as a potential successor to Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, von der Leyen apparently had other ideas. She manoeuvred her way to become the European Council’s pick to head the EU Commission, taking on the role in July 2019. Seldom can an institution and an individual have been so perfectly matched, so mutually suited to the challenge of aggrandising power behind well locked doors. 

Even before von der Leyen sashayed into Brussels five years ago, the European Commission had proved adept at stealthily augmenting its remit. From its birth back in the 1950s, it was envisaged as a supranational institution unrestrained by any form of democratic accountability. Over the years, as journalist and researcher Thomas Fazi notes in a just-published report, it “has increased its influence over areas of competence that have previously been considered the preserve of national governments—from financial budgets and health policy to foreign affairs and defence.”

Since von der Leyen’s arrival, this process has undergone what Fazi describes as “a rapid and substantial acceleration and intensification.” This has been facilitated by the deft exploitation of a sequence of crises, always geared to accumulating more authority and effecting permanent changes to the exercise of EU power.

European flags fly outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on September 20, 2023. | Photo Credit: YVES HERMAN

Oh, what a lovely pandemic!

For von der Leyen, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic so soon after her start as EU Commissioner was nothing short of serendipitous. Under her leadership, the EC assumed a leading role from the outset. After suspending the EU’s notoriously tight fiscal rules regarding government borrowing, it quickly unfurled the Next Generation EU Package, a €750 billion recovery fund offering grants and loans to member states. This crossed a new threshold: for the first time, the Commission itself was empowered to raise money on financial markets. It had also acquired a new tool by which to exercise financial pressure on member states.

Vaccines, once they became available, became another arena of power-building-by-stealth. Von der Leyen took the lead in promoting an EU-wide joint vaccine-procurement programme, and by November 2021, the Commission had (as Fazi notes) “signed a staggering €71 billion worth of contracts on behalf of the member states to purchase up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines—more than 10 doses for each European citizen.”

Then ‘Pfizergate’ broke: the revelation that, in April 2021, von der Leyen had personally struck a 35 billion euro deal—for the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—via a series of text messages and calls with Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla. Since then, every attempt—by journalists, the European Court of Auditors and the EU’s own ombudsman—to obtain unredacted copies of the text messages for public scrutiny has drawn a blank. What is beyond dispute is the stratospheric scale of the Commissioner’s ‘initiative’: by some estimates, the price per dose the EC agreed to was 15 times higher than the cost of production, suggesting that EU member states may have overpaid for the vaccines by more than €30 billion ($32.4 billion).

Somehow, von der Leyen floated on above it all, as if disconnected from the stench of scandal. In any case, another crisis ripe with potential was about to present itself.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as they attend a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium October 17, 2024. | Photo Credit: Johanna Geron

Enter Ukraine

For a Commission that has long resented the weak hand originally dealt to it in matters of foreign policy, defence and security, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has proved a windfall. Under von der Leyen’s stewardship, the institution has been able to expand its own mandate while at the same time policing and reinforcing EU alignment with US-NATO strategy.

In terms of landing punitive blows on Moscow, no one could have been quicker off the blocks than von der Leyen. Her initial sanctions package—the first of dozens—was in force the day after Russia’s invasion. With an alacrity that must have stunned the Biden administration, the EU imposed, in short order, asset freezes, travel bans, banking restrictions, export controls, import bans and embargoes on Russian energy. Since sanctions formed part of a Western response ultimately determined by Washington, the savvy Commissioner put her strong transatlantic ties to work in a bid to enhance her role and leverage. German economist Wolfgang Streeck has characterised the process thus: “In its effort at supranational European state building, the European Commission under von der Leyen deploy[ed] American pressure for European support in Ukraine as a lever to wrest from its member states additional powers and competences, a strategy supported by large sections of the European Parliament.”

The war in Ukraine has also provided von der Leyen with the pretext to extend and intensify the rapid-fire militarisation she drove while German defence minister. This has resulted in surging military budgets across EU member states, none more so than in Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz is now committed to meeting NATO’s defence target of 2 per cent of the GDP. All of this is taking place against a Brussels-emanating soundtrack of extreme bellicosity, dominated by the voice of von der Leyen urging an entire continent to in effect gird its loins, battle on, and bring Putin to his knees. No mean accomplishment this: the transformation of the EU into a warrior zone where defence budgets are surging, support for Ukraine is beyond debate, and uncritical obeisance to US strategy and priorities is the order of the day.

In May of this year, the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, supported by human rights groups and prominent scholars and experts in international criminal law, filed a complaint against von der Leyen at the International Criminal Court. The charge: complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The wheels of justice are said to turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. For the moment, von der Leyen continues to fly high, her role as de facto President of Europe cemented following behind-the-scenes manoeuvring in the wake of June’s European Parliamentary elections. On social media, you can see clips of her confronting protestors outraged at her stance on Palestine. She responds with a smile verging on a smirk, a slight raising of eyebrows. Beyond that, nothing. Nothing at all.  

Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.