Looking Ahead, But Not Forward, to Five More Years of “Queen” Ursula von der Leyen

After five years of overseeing creeping digital censorship, corruption, economic decline, war and institutional support for genocide, Von der Leyen has been given five more years to do more of the same, or worse.

In late October, I posited that the walls may finally be closing in on EU President Ursula von der Leyen. The lawsuits and investigations against the Pfizergate scandal were piling up and hundreds of EU officials had publicly denounced her one-sided support for Israel as the IDF began the task of ethnically cleansing roughly 2.1 million Gazan citizens. As Politico EUROPE reported, in doing so, she had breached her mandate as EU Commission president, leaving EU capitals “fum[ing]” at “Queen” Ursula’s go-it alone approach to EU foreign policy.

At the time, Von der Leyen (or VDL, as I shall henceforth refer to her) had not yet announced her attention to stand for reelection. It seemed, at least to this humble blogger’s eyes, that her unabashed support for Israel’s blatant war crimes in the early months of its invasion of Gaza would end up proving to be the final straw for her scandal-tarnished presidency.

As I noted in that piece, even if VDL did lose her job or was prevented from standing for a second term, her rare talent for failing upwards would ensure that she would land a new one that was at least as good, if not better — such as, say, NATO chief.

I was wrong on both counts. The top job at NATO HQ has been handed to Dutch premier Mark Rutte. And not only did VdL not lose her job as EU Commission president, she just got reelected — with a much larger margin than first time round. Which goes to show that a history of blatant corruption, total disregard for basic procedure and whole-hearted support of war crimes, including genocide, are not diqualifiers for the top political job in the European Union.

After five years of overseeing creeping digital censorship, corruption, economic decline, war and support for genocide, VdL has been given five more years to do more of the same, or worse. In total, 401 of the European Parliament’s 720 MEPs voted for VdL to stay on as chair of the European Commission in yesterday’s vote, giving VdL a bigger winning margin than during her first confirmation in 2019. According to Politico EUROP, after hearing the result, VdL “smiled, stood up and patted her hand against her [my insertion: cold, cold] heart.”

5 more years.

I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for the trust of all MEPs that voted for me. pic.twitter.com/d9n3yfIVtS

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) July 18, 2024

So, how did VdL pull this off?

For a start, she was able to count on most of the members of the three mainstream political groups that won a majority of the seats in the European elections last month and supported her in 2019 – her own centre-right European People’s party (188 seats), the Socialists (136), and the liberals of Renew (77). Given the vote for Commission president is secret, it’s impossible to know how many members of these three groupings turned out for VDL. But given the size of her majority, it is safe to assume that most did.

To hedge her bets, VdL also launched a charm offensive with Georgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), which has 78 seats in parliament, and the European Greens (53 seats). While ECR chose to let their 78 members vote freely, the European Greens, reassured by VdL’s apparent renewed commitment to the EU’s climate agenda and her pledge not to work with the far-right Identity and Democracy group, whose members include Italy’s Lega party and the National Rally in France, lent their full support behind her candidacy.

“As part of a 4-party majority, we’ll uphold the EU Green Deal, work on a social Europe for all & protect fundamental rights & the rule of law,” the Greens group said. “The cordon sanitaire against the far-right holds.”

VdL also promised the European Parliament’s pseudo-socialist block that her new Commission will prioritise affordable housing by, among other things, creating a dedicated housing commissioner and revising state aid rules to make it easier for member countries to build homes. In other words, she spread herself as far, wide and thinly as possible, “promising something to everyone,” writes Alberto Alemano in his Guardian article, “Ursula von der Leyen Has Lost Europe’s Trust. She Doesn’t Deserve a Second Term”:

[A]ll these groups, including those within her majority, have in the meantime formulated a range of demands that are difficult to reconcile. The Greens want a strong commitment on environmental policies, the EPP want her to revoke the EU’s 2035 ban on internal combustion engine-powered cars, the liberals want to cut red tape and Meloni wants more restrictive migration management.

As a result, von der Leyen has been spreading herself too thinly, promising something to everyone but not fully satisfying anyone. This political ambivalence is deliberate and tactical, but it may have damaged her support in the parliament and compromised her chances of re-election.

That didn’t happen. On the contrary, VdL secured a much more comfortable majority than last time. Of course, if the Commission President was actually elected by politically engaged, well-informed EU citizens — as opposed to being selected for the role by national EU leaders after weeks of backroom horse-trading and then presented to the European Parliament to seal the deal — VdL wouldn’t have a hope in hell of reelection, but that’s not how the EU works.

Assuming VdL makes it to the end of her second term, which is far from a given considering the pressures building in the EU as well as all the court cases and investigations she still faces), what does her reelection bode for the EU’s roughly 450 million citizens? Put simply, lots more bad things.* Here are a few ideas (this is far from an exhaustive list; readers are invited to chip in with their own suggestions):

More Corruption and Opacity

Two of the most important characteristics of VdL’s first term as Commission president were corruption and opacity. As NC newcomer George Georgiou, documented in his recent article, “Ursula Von der Leyen: Beyond Redemption“, during her political career VdL has faced allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis, conflicts of interest (as both German Defence Minister and EU Commission President), destroying evidence (ditto), inflation of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine contract, worth up to €36 billion, and nepotism.

Judging by VdL’s comfortable reelection, most MEPs are not worried about this or the fact that VDL is currently under criminal investigation, presumably because: a) they themselves are on one of the biggest gravy trains ever created; and b) despite their high salaries and expense accounts, some are also lining their pockets with bribes and kickbacks.

As readers may recall, in 2022 a number of MEPs were arrested in the Qatargate affair, the EU’s biggest graft scandal in decades. In late 2023, the Financial Times reported that “one year on, the… affair is bogged down in legal counter-probes that have called into question the Belgian authorities’ management of the case and delayed any potential trial.”

Much the same could be said of the European Public Prosecutor Office’s criminal investigation into the VdL Commission’s alleged misdeeds in the Pfizergate scandal, which also appears to have been led down a culdesac.

Just one day before the vote on VdL’s reelection, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European Commission had not been transparent enough regarding the vaccine contracts. A group of MEPs suggested postponing yesterday’s vote until September in order to digest the implications of the ruling but an overwhelming majority of MEPs rejected the proposal. As Politico EUROPE notes, other cases pertaining to the Pfizer contracts and communication between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla are pending in different EU jurisdictions.

More War and Even Less Jaw-Jaw 

Few people in Brussels have done more to promote the constant escalation of tensions with Russia than Von der Leyen. It is her Commission, with input from EU Member governments, that designed the 14 largely self-harming sanction packages against the Russian economy. As mentioned earlier, she was also instrumental in setting the direction and tone of the EU’s response — or rather, non-response — to the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. Put simply, five more years of VdL will mean more war and even less jaw-jaw.

In its appointment of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as the EU’s chief diplomat, the Commission appears to have selected someone even less diplomatic and even more hostile to Russia than Josep “the rest of the world is a jungle” Borrell. Kallas infamously said that the ultimate objective of war in Ukraine should be to break Russia up into lots of small countries. As tends to happen with many Commission appointments, Kallas is fresh from a scandal at home, this one revolving around her husband’s business ties to Russia — so, yes, more hypocrisy as well.

Tellingly, the first act of this new European Parliament was to condemn Viktor Orban’s diplomatic visit to Russia as a “blatant violation of the EU’s Treaties and common foreign policy.” It also unanimously passed a resolution that provided a commitment by the Parliament to maintain its support for Ukraine. Another indication of

VdL is also proposing to launch the long-awaited European Defence Union to deal with cross-border threats over the next five years, starting with a “European Air Shield and cyber defence”. In a document setting out her programme ahead of the EP vote on Thursday, she said:

“We will ensure that these major projects are open to all and we will use all of the tools at our disposal – both regulatory and financial – to ensure they are designed, built and deployed on European soil as quickly as possible.”

This prompted a warning from the Kremlin that the EU seems determined to set off a spiral of escalation. From Al Jazeera:

“[The plans] confirm the general attitude of European states to militarisation, escalation of tension, confrontation and reliance on confrontational methods in their foreign policy,” said [Kremlin spokesman Dmitry] Peskov.

“Everything is quite obvious here.”

The Kremlin spokesman added that while Russia did not pose a threat to the EU, actions by its member states regarding Ukraine “have excluded any possibility of dialogue and consideration of Russia’s concerns”.

“These are the realities in which we have to live, and this forces us to configure our foreign policy approaches accordingly,” Peskov said.

In recent weeks, NATO, of which the EU is a key member, has broadened the focus of its sabre-rattling to China, threatening the Asian superpower of being a “decisive enabler” of Russia through its “large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base”. If Brussels is stupid enough to begin targeting China, the EU’s biggest trading partner, with sanctions, there’s no telling just how much further its economy can fall.

More EU “Vassalization” to US (Depends on who is in Washington)

So far, the EU’s constant escalation of tensions with Moscow over Ukraine has achieved little bar prolonging the destruction of Ukraine, dynamiting the EU’s own economic prospects while placing the bloc more and more firmly under Washington’s thumb. On this point, it’s worth re-visiting the introductory paragraph of an article written last year (for Compact magazine) by Thomas Fazi :

For decades, the European Union was regarded as an emerging counterweight to US geopolitical hegemony that would accord its member states greater autonomy from the superpower across the Atlantic. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has revealed the emptiness of this promise. Today, Europe’s “vassalization” (in the words of an analyst for the European Council on Foreign Relations) is arguably more pronounced than at any time since the middle of the 20th century. On geopolitical questions, as the current war has made clear, Brussels has no meaningful independence from Washington. In the economic sphere, Europe’s relative decline and growing dependency on America—which predate the Ukraine conflict but have been exacerbated by it—are if anything even more evident.

Previously dubbed by Politico EUROPE as “Europe’s American President,” Von der Leyen, with her ancestral ties to US slave traders/owners, most notably the former plantation owner James Ladson, would presumably like nothing more than to continue this vassalization process during her second term. However, much will depend on the approach taken by the next US government. If, as expected, Donald J Trump wins November’s elections, he is likely, though not certain, to take a different tack to the Ukraine conflict, NATO and broader US-EU relations.

More Digital Censorship and Control

In VdL’s first term as Commission President, the EU made significant strides in the digital arena. The EU’s “Green Pass” vaccine passport system, which coincidentally shared the same name as Israel’s vaccine certificate system and which had been in the works since 2018, helped to ensure there was healthy demand for the COVID-19 vaccines, at least in the first year of their roll out. The EU’s “Green Pass” will apparently be used by the World Health Organization as a template for its proposed global digital health certificate.

Then, of course, there was the highly controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which is already being used to stifle the free exchange of information on social media platforms, not just in Europe but across the world. In one of the most Orwellian statements of recent times, for which the bar has been set vertiginously high, Thierry Breton, the European Commission for the Internal Market, said the actual purpose of the DSA is to “protect free speech against arbitrary decisions.”

The Associated Press described the act as cementing the EU’s position as “a global leader in reining in Big Tech.” Less than two months after becoming operational, the DSA was already being put to use to smother the spread of (in the Commission’s words) “incorrect, incomplete, or misleading” information about the war in the Middle East.

A week ago, the Commission warned Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly known as Twitter, that its blue checkmarks verification system is deceptive and that it falls short on transparency and accountability requirements (oh, the irony). It is accused the platform of not giving the EU’s army of fact-checking researchers sufficient access to public data. The Commission is also looking into whether the platform is doing enough to curb the spread of illegal content — such as hate speech — and the efficacy of its measures to combat “information manipulation.”

In late March, unbeknown to most EU citizens, digital identity became a legal reality across the 27-nation bloc after the Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers gave their final approval to the European Commission’s Digital Identity Regulation. The regulation obliges all member states to make a digital identity wallet available to every citizen who wants one. That is how the new system is currently being marketed — as an optional extra for citizens who want to avail of its many benefits.

The Digital Identity Wallet, the Commission says, will be used on a strictly voluntary basis, and “no one can be discriminated against for not using the wallet.” But as we reported in April, Greece’s national government has already announced that possession of the digital ID wallet will soon be necessary to access all sports stadiums.

As with the digital vaccine certificate, the goal will be to achieve as broad an uptake in as short a time as possible. As such, in the coming months one can expect to see more and more initiatives from national governments requiring the use of a digital ID wallet. In Spain, for example, the government is working on an initiative to require Internet users to download a digital ID wallet to verify that they are of adult age in order to access porn websites.

As with all such initiatives, mission creep is all but guaranteed: Spain’s Ministry of Digital Transformation is already talking of requiring a similar digital identity wallet to access other online platforms, including messaging applications, social networks or browsers.

Lastly, one thing to look out for in the next five years of Queen Ursula von der Leyen’s rule will be the launch of a digital euro. Once digital identity wallets are in widespread use, this will be the inevitable next step. The European Central Bank is already working on the preparatory phase of an EU-wide central bank digital currency. As Euro News reports, the Commission has already “proposed the legal framework that could pave the way for the ECB to make the digital euro project a reality. Now it up to the co-legislators to finalise it.”

One thing that is certain: EU citizens will not get to vote on whether they want a digital euro or not. As with digital identity, most of them do not even know it’s on its way.

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* Of course, most of these things would be happening with or without Ursula von der Leyen as president. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that she has played — and will continue to play — a stand-out role in their development.