LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Europe’s second-rate first lady
Portrait
Ursula von der Leyen’s European backstory looked perfect for the top job in Brussels. But like Hillary Clinton, her talent isn’t a match for her connections, and the EU is paying the price
ANDREW ADONIS
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM MCDONAGH
If you had to design a president of the European Commission from scratch, you might come up with Ursula von der Leyen. She is trilingual in English, German and French; studied in Hanover and London; lived in California; and was a right-hand ministerial colleague of Angela Merkel in Berlin. She was even born in Brussels, the daughter of a founding Eurocrat.
But therein lies her Achilles’s heel. Von der Leyen got into politics following in the footsteps of her father, a power broker in Germany’s dominant centre-right Christian Democratic Union party; but, for all her connections, experience and ambition, high-level political talent has never been evident. She is Europe’s Hillary Clinton. And, of late, her extraordinary bungling over vaccines and the Irish border has tarnished the European Commission and could come to damage the standing of the EU as a whole.
Down the ages, nepotism has more often benefitted mediocre men than mediocre women: in elective politics alone, George W Bush and Rajiv Gandhi spring to mind as lesser copies of their father and mother respectively. But von der Leyen’s mode of entry into a male-dominated political world creates a parallel with Clinton who, as the failed presidential candidate put it in her memoirs, had a “20-year career in government as first lady, senator and secretary of state.” At the crunch Clinton couldn’t get herself elected to the top job, failing at different stages in 2008 and 2016.
Von der Leyen is the first female Commission president, after 12 men. But the crucial difference with Clinton is that she didn’t have to be elected by the people—she was simply appointed, then confirmed by a wafer-thin majority in a European parliament presented with no alternative. “She was pulled like a rabbit out of a hat,” in the words of Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s liberal Free Democrat party.
Von der Leyen’s shortcomings are encouraging the “other” EU president—European Council president Charles Michel, a former prime minister of Belgium—to assert himself at her expense. Since the inception of a separate Council president in 2009, that job had been more chair than chief executive—specifically, presiding over sessions of EU heads of government. Michel, however, has bigger ideas. This is the significance of “sofagate,” the now iconic meeting of the two EU presidents with President Erdoğan on 7th April. In front of the world’s cameras, Michel made a beeline for the gilded chair next to the Turkish leader, relegating von der Leyen to a distant sofa. “I felt hurt, and I felt alone, as a woman,” she said. But as one EU ambassador said to me: “I don’t think Angela Merkel would have gone to the sofa.”
To understand Ursula von der Leyen and her impact on contemporary European leadership, you need to start with her late father, Ernst Albrecht.
The Albrechts were princelings of Europe: a great north German Hanseatic dynasty with ancestors from assorted European aristocracies, whose members were cotton merchants, doctors and royal diplomats. Born in 1930, Ernst just avoided fighting in Hitler’s war but he experienced its full devastation. He studied law and economics first in Tübingen in southern Germany and then, more significant in raising his sights, at Cornell University in New York (one of his grandmothers came from a prominent plantation-owning family in South Carolina). Ernst was determined to become an architect not only of a new Germany but a new Europe. Hence his master’s thesis at the University of Bonn, the capital of Konrad Adenauer’s new Federal Republic of Germany: “Is monetary union a prerequisite for economic union?”