Ursula von der Leyen’s second term depends on new ‘frenemies’
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Ursula von der Leyen needed a little help from her political foes to secure her first term as president of the European Commission.
With some lawmakers in her own camp voting against her or abstaining, she scraped through the European parliament vote in 2019 with a margin of only nine votes, to win the EU’s top executive job, helped by nationalist parties in Poland and Hungary.
As she aims for a second, five-year term this year after June’s EU elections, the centre-right von der Leyen is again going to have to find “frenemies” to secure the votes she needs.
“She’s got a good record to run on. But any politician who gets things done inevitably burns bridges,” said Simon Hix, politics professor at the European University Institute, a research institute in Florence. “The coalition that elected her has gradually eroded over time.”
The difficulties she faces were demonstrated this week by the resignation of her choice to become the EU’s small and medium enterprise envoy after a political backlash from her fellow commissioners and MEPs.
Markus Pieper, who, like von der Leyen, comes from Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party, was appointed in January despite achieving lower scores than two other applicants during the appointment process. Last week, the parliament passed a resolution calling on von der Leyen to reconsider the decision, while four commissioners from rival parties also objected.
Over her five years in office, von der Leyen has steered the bloc’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and pushed through ambitious legislation aimed at fighting climate change and transforming the bloc’s economy with a “Green Deal”.
She is credited with marshalling an €800bn joint borrowing programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic and with the common purchasing of vaccines. The EU is now considering using money from these schemes for Europe’s defence industry and to arm Ukraine.
“She’s the most high-profile commission president since Jacques Delors,” said Hix, in reference to the Frenchman who built the single market and initiated EU social policies in the 1980s.
But initial impressions that von der Leyen, a former German defence minister, would sail through to a second term have given way to a realisation that the politics are becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.
Von der Leyen can no longer count on the support of the right-wing nationalist parties that supported her five years ago, after she withheld EU funds from Warsaw and Budapest over rule-of-law disputes.
A narrow parliamentary majority in her favour is still likely to emerge eventually following EU elections in June, but she will again have to find parliamentarians from outside her own political family to vote her in for a second term.
In 2019 she secured 383 votes in the 747-strong assembly — fewer than her predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker, who had 422. The new parliament will have 720 seats, meaning that she needs 361 votes.
Three parliamentary groups — her own centre-right European People’s party (EPP), the centre-left Socialists and Democrats and the liberal Renew — backed her bid in 2019. But up to 100 MEPs from those groups either voted against her or abstained.
She passed because many of the 35 lawmakers from Poland’s then-ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and the party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Fidesz, voted for her, as well as a handful of non-aligned members and one Green.
The numbers look challenging again this year. Far-right groups are gaining traction and if current opinion polls are correct, the three centrist groups that are likely to support her will secure 395 out of 720 seats. That means her re-election could be at risk if a few dozen lawmakers rebel against the party line — and if no other MEPs vote in her favour.
To pre-empt that, von der Leyen has been courting Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy (FdI) party is expected to secure about 30 seats. The commission chief has already tacked right and backed Meloni’s tough stance on illegal migration.
Meloni’s party currently sits together with the Polish PiS party in the ultraconservative ECR group — but some in von der Leyen’s EPP party have made overtures to get FdI to switch over to them.
Officials in Brussels say von der Leyen’s tactic could alienate lawmakers who sit with leftist and green groups, and encourage more rebellion within her own camp.
Valérie Hayer, leader of Renew and an ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, has said she considers Meloni to be far right and that if the Italian leader backs von der Leyen publicly, Hayer would withdraw the group’s support for the commission president.
But other liberals from countries including the Netherlands and Sweden are less ideological and on a national level have joined with parties that are in the same groups in the EU parliament as Orban’s Fidesz or Meloni’s party.
The Socialists, forecast to come second after the EPP and part of the 2019 pro-von der Leyen bloc, are also committed to excluding the far right from any power-sharing deal.
“We won’t negotiate with the extreme right and the candidate for the European Commission presidency should commit to our priorities,” said Iratxe García Perez, the Socialist group’s leader in parliament.
“Whoever wants our support should commit to our priorities: a just [green] transition, both to a more sustainable and digital economic model; rule of law and equality.”
The Italian premier, who has forged an unexpectedly warm working relationship with von der Leyen since coming to power in 2022, has kept quiet about whether she would support a second term for the German.
Carlo Fidanza, a Meloni ally and leader of her party in the European parliament, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that “it was too early to say” what Meloni might do. About von der Leyen’s re-election bid, he warned: “Experience teaches us that in these negotiations, often you enter a Pope and come out a cardinal.”
On the left, von der Leyen could also seek the backing of the Greens, who are expected to lose dozens of seats compared with 2019. Back then, they refrained from supporting her in a first vote but they subsequently backed her team of commissioners after she made more green policy pledges.
In recent months, von der Leyen has watered down those climate policies to appease angry farmers who have been protesting across the bloc.
Bas Eickhout, a lead candidate for the Greens for the commission presidency, said they could potentially support von der Leyen for a second term but only with strong commitments to a “Green Deal 2.0”.
“We are in the kingmaker’s position,” Eickhout said. Like Renew’s Hayer, he ruled out teaming up with the Meloni-led group, which he described as “not pro-European”.
There are also national interests at stake. Les Républicains, the French lawmakers within the EPP, have already said they will not vote for von der Leyen because she is too close to President Emmanuel Macron, who is from Renew.
“There are lots of jigsaw puzzle pieces. She’s just going to have to find the right ones,” said Hix.
Additional reporting by Amy Kazmin in Rome
This story has been corrected since first publication to give the right description of the European University Institute
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