Ursula von der Leyen should get a second five-year term at the head of the European Commission despite the somewhat phoney drama around her confirmation vote in the European parliament on Thursday.
To be sure, the 65-year-old centre-right former German defence minister cannot be certain of winning the absolute majority of 361 votes required to retain her job. Several members of the informal pro-European parliamentary coalition of the conservative European People’s party (EPP), the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the liberal centrist Renew Europe (RE) campaigned against her or have said they will not vote for her.
That means she will need extra votes, probably from a much diminished Greens group, possibly also from Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, although not from her national conservative European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group as a whole. She will not cut formal deals with either, but she will have to offer sufficient assurances on their key concerns – implementing climate-protection laws for the Greens and a harder line on migration for Meloni – to ensure their support.
The uncertainty is mostly due to national politics. French conservatives and socialists see her as too close to their domestic nemesis, centrist president Emmanuel Macron. Germany’s FDP liberals oppose her mostly because she is a member of their conservative Christian Democratic (CDU) opponents. Ireland’s Fine Gael MEPs say they won’t back her due to her full-throated support for Israel in its war on the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza in response to its 7 October massacre of Israelis.
All politics is local, as former US House of Representatives speaker Tip O’Neill famously said. But EU politicians need to look to the geopolitical storms beyond their home fronts.
On the big issues – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the response to Covid-19 and the climate emergency – von der Leyen has made the right choices. On her watch, the EU bought vaccines collectively to protect European citizens, launched unprecedented joint borrowing to fund economic recovery from the pandemic and adopted a signature package of laws known as the European Green Deal designed to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050.
Moreover, she has been at the heart of the EU’s firm response to Russia’s war, preparing immediate sanctions on Moscow and joint support for Ukraine in close coordination with the US and the UK. Von der Leyen has been the answer to Henry Kissinger’s apocryphal question: “If I want to speak to Europe, what number do I call?”
Politicians don’t automatically deserve another term just because they have an impressive record. Think of Winston Churchill in 1945. In democracies, voters – in this case MEPs – need to be convinced by a vision for the future and not just an assurance of continuity.
The EU is facing existential challenges from Russia’s revisionist militarism, China’s assertive quest for hegemony and the authoritarian pact between the two of them, as well as deepening uncertainty over the future reliability of the US as Europe’s guardian superpower. It also faces fierce internal headwinds from the rise of nationalists and populists who demonise the EU as the anonymous, globalising bureaucratic face of “the system” rather than a structure for solving common problems together and making Europe stronger in a dangerous world.
Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump would be delighted if a combination of the extreme right, assorted nationalists, communists and grumpy conservatives plunged the EU into crisis by voting her down.
On all these challenges, von der Leyen has made the right calls and offers at least the potential to lead the EU decisively over the next five years. As she writes that speech of a lifetime for Thursday’s parliamentary session, she should be bolder rather than more cautious in confronting the risks that Europe faces.
Critics of the way the EU functions argue that the commission ought to change its leader to acknowledge the rightward shift of public opinion manifested in the record vote for Eurosceptics and nationalists in June’s European parliament elections. Yet pro-European parties retained a clear majority in the legislature, even if hard-right parties topped the poll in several countries, notably in France, Italy and Hungary.
Those who voted for Eurosceptical populists mostly expressed concerns about the cost of living, social inequality, migration and the costs for ordinary people of adapting to the net-zero objective, notably in replacing old cars with electric vehicles and old gas or fossil-fuel boilers with heat pumps. The answer to these legitimate worries cannot be to slow down a green transition that is already running behind the pace of climate-induced disasters.
Instead the next commission must pay more attention to softening the social impact of climate adaptation by using present and future EU funds to complement national measures targeting households in need of help to make the transition to clean energy and heating. It must also rally EU countries to spend their increased defence outlays rationally and together, and produce more defence capabilities in Europe instead of buying them abroad.
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After decades in principled opposition to the EU leadership, the Greens have signalled a new pragmatism in reaction to their electoral drubbing in June. To stay relevant in the European parliament and influence commission policies, they need to be part of von der Leyen’s majority rather than crying in the wilderness. If she is beholden to the Greens for her re-election, that gives them some leverage over her to withstand pressure to reverse course on issues ranging from phasing out fossil fuels to banning dangerous chemical pesticides.
That leaves the question of how she can secure the support of Meloni, who abstained noisily when the European Council of EU leaders voted to nominate von der Leyen last month. There may be dark ways of buying Meloni off with jobs for her MEPs or for Italy’s commission nominee, but on policy her key demand is a tougher fight against illegal migration, notably by processing more asylum requests outside the EU, as Italy is planning to do with limited numbers in Albania.
That approach is anathema to human rights campaigners and may have little impact on the overall number of migrants seeking refuge in Europe due to wars, natural disasters and extreme poverty in their homelands. But in an age of gesture politics, von der Leyen may need to signal some concession to assuage the pressure for such a move.
Once elected, she will have a freer hand to shape her key green, economic and defence policies to make the EU more effective. That is the best response to Europe’s populist backlash.
