Europe | Charlemagne

Does Ursula von der Leyen have the right skills for the EU Commission?

She is less twinset and pearls than knuckle-dusters and caffeine pills

IT IS HARD to imagine a biography less suited to the mood of today’s Europe than that of Ursula von der Leyen, the German incoming president of the European Commission. Insurgent parties are sweeping the continent, cracks are forming between and within the EU’s member states and new threats are looming in the wider world. Mrs von der Leyen is the posh daughter of a Christian Democrat (CDU) minister-president of Lower Saxony. She rose through various government roles as an ally of Angela Merkel, glides multilingually through the world’s foreign-policy salons and can seem rather prim. Many consider her spell as German defence minister a debacle. Just what the old continent needs, one might groan: a slick, over-promoted scion of Europe’s unloved political establishment.

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The manner of Mrs von der Leyen’s election supports that gloomy gloss. She was never a favourite to run the EU’s executive but rather a last-ditch candidate stumbled upon by sleep-deprived leaders at the conclusion of a three-day summit two weeks ago. In a speech before the European Parliament ahead of a binding approval vote on July 16th she issued a screed of mostly familiar albeit sensible policy proposals designed to secure a centrist majority, including faster progress towards carbon-emissions targets, enabling the EU to take some foreign-policy decisions without reaching unanimity, more capital-markets integration and a 50% female commission. She had hoped to win over socialists, liberals and greens as well as members of her own centre-right bloc—together the four hold 518 of the 751 seats in the parliament. But she failed to persuade parts of the centre-left and won her tiny nine-seat majority with the support of some opportunistic MEPs from populist groups.

Appearances can be deceptive, however. Where Mrs Merkel is more straightforward than she sometimes seems, her erstwhile protégée is more enigmatic. And that is grounds for open-mindedness about her prospects as the first woman to be commission president goes about building her team of commissioners with national governments, who formally propose its members.

For one thing, her background is not as smooth as it sounds. Her father was once an outsider in his own party. He took on the right-wingers who dominated his state branch and transformed it into one of the party’s most liberal outposts. “There was the Lower Saxon CDU before Ernst Albrecht and there was the Lower Saxon CDU after Ernst Albrecht,” notes Alexander Clarkson of King’s College London. Far from being a teacher’s pet, Mrs von der Leyen drifted for periods of her youth and spent a liberating spell as a student in London that, she says, gave her an “inner freedom”. She was never truly a creature of the CDU and was plucked from relative obscurity by Mrs Merkel, who admired her no-nonsense style, to become families minister in 2005. In that job Mrs von der Leyen appalled traditionalists by bringing in a swathe of social reforms, such as extending paternity leave and expanding child-care provision. As labour minister she tried but failed to bring in quotas for women in boardrooms.

Her toughest assignment came when in 2013 she moved into the Bendlerblock, the grand complex housing Germany’s defence ministry and long considered the ejector seat of German ministerial careers. Her record there is at best mixed—Germany’s armed forces remain woefully under-equipped—but better than it looks. Mrs von der Leyen inherited a department scarred by decades of hierarchical conservatism, strategic sluggishness and underfunding and has led it during a period when pacifist, cautious Germany has undertaken recently unimaginable foreign military commitments in places like Mali, Iraq and Lithuania. She has championed a networked, active German role in the world (“leadership from the centre” she calls it) and has fought doughtily for budget increases. Her attempt to take on the brass and the bureaucrats by using outside experts, most notably appointing a management consultant to a senior job, ruffled feathers and prompted a still-ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the allocation of lucrative contracts to consultancies. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Mrs Merkel’s favoured successor as chancellor, takes over from Mrs von der Leyen in the ejector seat.

Judgment reserved

Peter Dausend and Elisabeth Niejahr, Mrs von der Leyen’s biographers, compare her to a school pupil who takes on the strongest child in the playground. It seems reckless, but has advantages. Failure is assumed; victory carries big rewards. A certain gutsiness also marks her manner of working. She prefers to hold meetings not sitting down but on foot, and works next to trusted aides with laptops adjacent “like duetting pianists at one piano”. One military official says she often sleeps in the ministry. Frenetic, driven and a natural troublemaker, the real Mrs von der Leyen belies her smooth public image: less twinset and pearls than knuckle-duster and caffeine pills.

All of which could mean that choosing her for a five-year spell at the Commission’s helm is a gamble. The vote on July 16th was deceptive. Mrs von der Leyen’s narrow majority said less about her authority than about the strategic feints, procedural grumbles and face-saving measures of MEPs from across the spectrum. Such is today’s fragmented and febrile European politics. The question is less what MEPs make of her now than whether she can bridge those gaps with broadly acceptable proposals that respond to Europe’s many challenges. That will take an ability to confront people but also to broker deals, so Mrs von der Leyen should appoint experienced commission hands like Margrethe Vestager, the Danish competition supremo, to powerful roles. Smooth and abrasive, established and insurgent, the incoming president may turn out to be the worst of all worlds. But with a strong team around her it is also possible that her contradictions will prove a blessing.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Knuckle-dusters and pearls"

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