Is von der Leyen running for a second term?

The president's state of the union sounded like a campaign speech, and she wants to "finish the job". But this is an appointment not an election. VDL's biggest obstacles are her party and her country.

President von der Leyen’s speech was complimented with EU taxpayer-funded campaign graphics in the official broadcast

Whatever lingering doubts about the ‘will she or won’t she?’ question were still around, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put them to rest yesterday in the final State of the European Union address of her (first?) term. The only remaining question is ‘can she?’

The address, given by the EU President to a sitting of the European Parliament once a year, is a copy of the US version - a tradition created by the Lisbon Treaty and first given in 2010. Von der Leyen started her speech talking about next year’s election and mentioned not-so-subtly that she has 300 days left until the election. The official feed of the speech featured taxpayer-funded campaign graphics about her political accomplishments (can you imagine that happening with the US state of the union?). The question everyone in Brussels is asking is whether she wants a second term. But because of the weirdness of the EU’s system of picking a president, it almost doesn’t matter whether she wants it or not. In fact, in order to get it she needs to pretend she doesn’t want it. She reportedly has already confirmed she will not run as a candidate in the parliament election, and it is unclear whether the EPP will position her as their lead candidate for president.

Under the EU treaties (the union’s continually updated constitution), the European Commission President is appointed by the European Council (the prime ministers or presidents from each EU country) by a majority vote weighted by each country’s population. That appointment must be confirmed by a majority vote in the European Parliament. The term is the same as MEPs’ terms, so the appointment process happens every five years right after the European Parliament elections. By tradition, the Council is supposed to nominate someone from the party that won the most seats in the election. However this isn’t codified, and all that really matters is that the person can secure a majority vote of confidence in the newly-constituted parliament. And to understand the prospects of von der Leyen returning for a second term, you need to understand the shenanigans that went on in this process over the past decade.

The 2014 presidential debate was provided for free by the EBU to Europe’s public broadcasters but was only shown on a main station in Belgium and Austria. It aired in the UK on BBC Parliament.

Denying Europeans the vote

The process is, to put it mildly, a very indirect way for EU citizens to select their president. Yes, the prime ministers they elected are making the appointment. And yes, the MEPs they elected are confirming the appointment. But there was never any campaign or outreach to citizens about it - until 2014. That year, the European Parliament (with the help of Viviane Reding who was the Justice Commissioner at the time) pushed through a new system of selecting the president called the “Spitzenkandidat” (German for top candidate). Each pan-European political party selected a candidate ahead of the election (the center-right EPP even had a primary), and those people campaigned around Europe and held a presidential candidates’ debate. Under the system, the nominee of the party that won the most seats would become president. There was just one problem: there was no guarantee before the election that this was anything more than political theater.

The spitzenkandidat system was not official in any treaty, nor had it been endorsed by the European Council, who under the treaties has the sole right of appointing the president. The idea was that the Council would be pressured into accepting the system, or else they would look anti-democratic. And that year, it worked. The centre-right EPP won the most seats and the Council (which was also majority EPP) agreed to appoint the EPP nominee, Jean-Claude Juncker. British Prime Minister David Cameron tried in vain to convince his colleagues that this was a big mistake, and that by doing so the Council was ceding its power over the Commission presidency to the parliament and putting the EU one step closer to a super-state that would have a directly-elected president (the horror!). Cameron had few to no allies in the Council, and he was ignored.

Debate 2019 - where’s von der Leyen?

Flash forward to 2019, and the spitzenkandidat system had a new enemy who was much more powerful in Europe: Emmanuel Macron. Macron had the same objection as Cameron: selecting the Commission president is the right of the heads of countries, and it should not be given away to the parliament/people. And so, even though the European parties had gone through the whole process again of selecting candidates, holding a debate and running campaigns, Macron corralled the national leaders in the European Council into ignoring them. He even opposed his own political group’s nominee, Margrethe Vestager, seemingly only because she had been a spitzenkandidat during the campaign. The message was clear: appointing anyone who had participated in the democratic process would enshrine this tradition and result in the Council permanently losing this power. They had to choose someone who had never expressed any interest in being president. Enter Ursula von der Leyen.

Understated Ursula

After the embarrassing 2019 debacle, the spitzenkandidat idea is dead - even if a zombie version of it is resurrected in 2024. If the precedent has now been set that the Council can just ignore all of the candidates, running it again is a laughably pointless exercise whose only purpose would appear to many as the EPP just looking for a democratic fig leaf for von der Leyen’s re-appointment. The European Parliament has no credibility left in running the system after insisting in 2019 they would not confirm anyone who hadn’t been a spitzenkandidat in the campaign, only to then humiliatingly surrender and confirm von der Leyen (by just nine votes - many MEPs across the political spectrum believed her appointment was undemocratic).

The problem is also that the system doesn’t have many vocal defenders anymore. Surveys conducted after the only time it was used to completion, in 2014, found little citizen knowledge of it. European media had largely ignored the process (most broadcasters couldn’t even be bothered to show the live televised debate between the candidates held in 2014). The headwinds against making this a more democratic exercise coming from the media and national governments are just too strong. And many are assuming von der Leyen is a shoe-in for reappointment anyway, no matter what happens.

The calm and reassuring mother of seven has been exactly what national leaders want: a good communicator who isn’t going to challenge their authority. On one hand she is in no way a Jacques Delors, the most powerful and headstrong Commission President in history who is more responsible than anyone else for the current confederal model of the EU, diluting the power of national governments. Nor is she a José Manuel Barroso, the two-term president of the Commission who by contrast was extremely acquiescent to the wishes of member states (particularly France and Germany) but was also not a good communicator and not a well-known face. By being the calm public face of the EU as it navigated the crises of the past four years, von der Leyen has probably become the most publicly-known commission president in EU history (for all his power and consequence, how many people on the street could name Delors?).

For national leaders she’s the perfect combination: inoffensive, politically skilled and acquiescent. She has not picked fights with member states, issued the fewest infringements against national governments in living memory, and has gone easy on Hungary and Poland. She hasn’t seemed particularly concerned with institutional power battles, she just gets the job done. And by all accounts she has done so within the Commission with a notoriously headstrong my-way-or-the-highway approach that has disregarded most of her commissioners - something that’s probably unfortunately necessary given the unwieldy 27-strong size of the college forced upon the EU (thanks again for that, Ireland).

Death by Green Deal

However as we get close to the election next June, it’s becoming clear there’s going to be one major problem: her climate laws. The European Green Deal, unveiled almost immediately after she took office, has been her signature policy. Through it, the EU has passed the most ambitious climate policy anywhere in the world (no matter what Biden might say about the IRA). But lately the centre-right EPP, von der Leyen’s own political party, has been going after her green policies in a new populist pitch as campaigning starts. So far they’ve been doing so under an artifice that this ‘climate overreach’ was not their own von der Leyen’s fault but instead done under the nefarious influence of her vice president, Frans Timmermans. Timmermans has just left the Commission to run in the Dutch election to be prime minister. And von der Leyen’s EPP is now urging her to rein in the Green Deal now that he’s gone.

But though he was in charge of implementing the Green Deal, Timmermans was not its creator - nor was he forcing it down von der Leyen’s throat. This is her baby, and for her party to suggest that little old Ursula was helpless in the face of big burly beardy Timmermans is frankly just insulting. So people were closely watching von der Leyen’s State of the European Union speech yesterday to see if she would defend her green deal in the face of this onslaught from the right. She did - in words at least. “When it comes to the European Green Deal we stay the course - we stay ambitious,” she told the chamber. That earned her plaudits from the Left, Greens and Macron’s MEPs.

However the heat on von der Leyen has only started, and after her speech it was clear the MEPs from her own party heard something quite different - or were pretending to at least. Manfred Weber, the EPP group’s leader who was its spitzenkandidat in 2019 and has never seemed to get over being usurped by von der Leyen, said after her speech: “We welcome the new face of the green deal.” The message of Weber, who is leading the push for the EPP to court the far-right and embrace populist anti-climate-action messaging, was clear: you better have just said you are backing off on the climate stuff. German MEP Christian Ehler, an influential EPP member of the parliament’s industry committee, also seemed to think von der Leyen had had a road to Damascus moment. “The Green Deal added massively on the regulatory burden for European industry, so I very much welcome the President's announcement on serious efforts to make our regulatory system more attuned to fostering competitiveness,” he said after the speech.” “With Timmermans’ departure you have an opportunity to get back on the right track, starting with the basics: climate change isn’t the EU’s problem,” said right-wing MEP Marco Zanni.

However von der Leyen feels about her green deal, the cold hard reality is that a robust defence of it does not line up with her political interests. It is not possible for von der Leyen to be appointed to a second term as president without the support of her EPP group, or without the support of the German government which at the moment is controlled by the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals. It is the trickiest of tightropes to walk. She is not beholden to Europe’s citizens, she is beholden to her party and the 27 men and women in the European Council. Eight of those people are from the center-right EPP, and four are from the far right. The real target of her state of the union campaign speech may have been revealed in a slip-of-the-tongue when she accidentally referred to the people in the chamber as “honorable member states” instead of “honorable members”.

If Weber’s rumored vision of a centre-right-far-right majority coalition in the next parliamentary term comes to pass, there is no way von der Leyen can be confirmed unless she has backed off on the green deal. And as for the left and liberal governments of Europe, of which her own Germany is one, none have come out and strongly opposed the EPP’s new messaging and insisted she must not waver on keeping the Green Deal as ambitious as it started.

If von der Leyen does want re-appointment, it is in Ursula von der Leyen’s political interest to throw Timmermans under the bus, pretend any ‘overreach’ was his fault and give at least some concessions backing off of climate policies. That may take the form of axing plans to set an emissions reduction target for 2040, or setting it at very low ambition. Or, if she is more concerned about her legacy than with holding on to power, she can dig in her heels and really “stay the course”.

We will have no way of knowing for sure whether von der Leyen wants a second term for some time. Perversely, we’re now in a situation in the EU where the only way to rule yourself out of becoming Commission President is to say you want the job. But her actions on climate policy over the coming 300 days will no doubt be a clue.