If the European parliament approves Ursula von der Leyen’s nomination in two weeks’ time, the German defence minister will make for an unusual European commission president: a consensus candidate who has won the approval of western liberals and eastern rightwingers, yet is proving divisive in her home country.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has praised the 60-year-old for having “the DNA of the European community”, while the conservative Polish newspaper Gazeta Polska has hailed her nomination as a “historic choice”. However, in Germany the prospect of a German filling the commission presidency for the first time in 52 years has been met with outcries across the political spectrum.
The former leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) Martin Schulz described Von der Leyen as “the government’s weakest minister”, while his SPD colleague Sigmar Gabriel, a former vice-chancellor, called her nomination “an unprecedented act of political trickery”.
The Greens bemoaned Von der Leyen’s nomination as an “old-school backroom deal”, the pro-business Free Democrats said she was “not the best candidate”, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland said her selection would amount to “cheating voters” and even Manfred Weber, the candidate that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union had originally fielded for the top commission post, lamented a “sad day for European democracy”.
Katarina Barley, a former SPD justice minister who is now one of the new European parliament’s vice-presidents, said she would vote against her former cabinet colleague – a move endorsed by leading German newspapers such as Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Von der Leyen was an “inappropriate” choice, the paper said, because her track record in the defence ministry was so poor that she should long ago have resigned. “She will be unable to cope with the commission presidency,” it added.
In a bizarre twist, Germany was the only of the 28 EU member states to abstain from the vote to nominate her.
Few of Von der Leyen’s critics question that her CV ticks the right boxes, however. Born in Brussels to one of the first pan-European civil servants, she speaks fluent French and English, and built up a profile in the early years of her career with a bold commitment to a “United States of Europe, modelled on federal states like Switzerland, Germany or the US”.
Many German commentators note the progress made under her current cabinet brief, defence integration. Her diplomatic effort in organising the 2016 Nato mission in the Aegean Sea in response to the refugee and migrant crisis required support from both Greece and Turkey, and is said to have won her admirers in Brussels.
During her time in charge of Germany’s family ministry, from 2005 to 2009, she confounded expectations by radically expanding nurseries and parental pay; in 2017, she voted for same-sex marriage when her mentor Merkel voted against.
But since taking over defence in 2013, Von der Leyen’s popularity has plummeted – she sits second from bottom in Der Spiegel’s approval ratings monitor.
Her defenders say being in charge of Germany’s underfunded military is a poisoned chalice – the job used to be known as the “ejector seat” because it curtailed the careers of so many of her predecessor. The fact that the first woman to hold the post has survived is testimony to her staying power, they add.
However, at least one of the scandals surrounding the defence ministry is closely linked to Von der Leyen: a parliamentary committee is investigating accusations of nepotism in connection to the allocation of contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to external consultants. One management consultancy firm awarded with jobs was McKinsey, where her son works as an associate.
By focusing her reform efforts of the armed forces on “soft factors” such as working hours and nurseries, Von der Leyen is accused of having ignored bigger challenges around training and equipment – and lost support among the military in the process.
“To put it mildly: German soldiers don’t feel very loved by her,” said journalist Thomas Wiegold, a leading chronicler of the country’s military. Relations reached a nadir in 2017, when she accused her troops of having an “attitude problem”.
Yet Wiegold said Von der Leyen was only partially to blame for scandals that have plagued her ministry, and said she compared favourably to predecessors who managed to say the right things to please troops while at the same time signing off significant budget cuts. In May, she announced a €5bn (£4.4bn) increase in the German defence spending, the biggest since the end of the cold war.
The force with which German politicians have attacked Von der Leyen’s EU nomination is more easily explained by the disappointment that followed the collapse of the so-called “spitzenkandidaten” process of appointing the commission president, whereby the main party bloc in the European parliament nominate a lead candidate for the role, even though that candidate can only be voted in one country.
Aborting the process amounted to “deceiving and cheating on voters” who had been sold the system as a crucial step to democratising the EU, according to a former German vice-president of the commission.
“If you had to invent a way to further disillusion in democracy and politics Europe, then you would come up exactly with what has happened now,” Günter Verheugen told Deutschlandradio. “The damage is great and the consequences cannot yet be foreseen.”
Yet critics of “spitzenkandidaten” say the system was a German invention that was never truly accepted as an official procedure by most other member states. None of the three top contenders – Weber, the SPD’s Frans Timmermans and the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager – managed to gain a clear majority among MEPs.
In the light of that, Von der Leyen was “a decent solution”, said the centre-left German broadsheet Die Tageszeitung. “She has experience and respect on the European stage, she stands for a moderate Merkel-CDU, and she won’t allow herself to be bullied by any of the heads of state.”
