She has fans who see her as a blue-and-yellow star in the European firmament – thanks to ‘the Ukrainian colors’ she has liked to wear in recent months. As Commission President, she is not only more visible than her last five male predecessors, she is also doing better in popularity polls. Those who are charmed by her praise her mastery, elegance and above all, discipline.
A woman who squeezed out a dissertation titled C-reaktives Protein as a diagnostic parameter zur Erfassung eines Amnioninfektionssyndroms bei vorzeitigem Blasensprung und therapeuticm Entspannungsbad in der Geburtsvorbereitung, he is also capable of wrestling through very tedious European files in the evenings. Her predecessor Jean Claude Juncker lived in a hotel suite in Brussels, read poetry and ordered good bottles of red wine. During the week, Ursula von der Leyen lives in a room measuring 5 by 5 meters next to her office on the thirteenth floor of the Berlaymont building. No wine on her table, no Rilke, no chocolate, only files. And what you already suspected: the lights go out on time every evening.
Cleaned up is neat
People who are less enamored with Von der Leyen, ‘VDL’ in Brussels jargon, say that discipline is not the same as competence. Those who ventured on her dissatisfied reading dissertation discovered plagiarism. MEPs experienced that critical feedback from VDL slides off like a cheerful mannequin. The European Ombudsman wanted to access her Pfizer text messages from the start of the pandemic and was told she had deleted them. Cleaned up neatly. She looked cheerful as always.
Von der Leyen’s name was launched at the eleventh hour in 2019 by French President Macron to an over-tired, “devastated” crowd. Her appointment put an end to the attempt by the European Parliament with Spitzenkandidaten to get a grip on the Commission presidential election. Spitzen candidate Martin Schulz from Aachen was so angry that he shouted that von der Leyen was the weakest minister under Merkel. The resentment of this stocky bearded man immediately radiated favorably on Von der Leyen.
man with beard
You can argue that the key success factor of her presidency is the contrast. If a star comes out beautifully in a firmament, it may have to do with less beauty nearby. In 2021, for example, there was the ugly behavior of another stocky man with a beard, EU President Charles Michel. He eagerly took a seat in the one chair that the Turkish president had prepared for two EU leaders. VDL simply said ‘um’ and was then inundated with statements of adhesion. Michel went through the dust, but the incident stuck with him.
The sharpest contrast was provided by a stocky man based in Moscow. They say that bosom friend Gerd Schröder told Putin that he had nothing to fear from EU leadership when he called von der Leyen “a woman, not a power figure.” Things went very differently. She went to Kyiv when it was still unsafe there. She seized on the war to emphasize the difference between Russia and the European Union. The visual aspect helped enormously: Putin looks resentful and sickly, she radiates optimism and health. A mea culpa – ‘we should have listened to you when you warned us about Putin’ – made her the first Commission president appreciated in eastern member states.
On September 14, she presented the State of the Union address in a blue suit over a yellow blazer. Recall that Jean Claude Juncker in a blue and yellow suit would have looked like a clown.