When, by a narrow majority, Ursula von der Leyen became European Commission president in July 2019, it was taken for granted that this rather centrist German Christian Democrat would simply fulfil the traditional duties of the role. She would act as figurehead for a Brussels bureaucracy that is sometimes accused of living on another planet, maintaining a careful balance between the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the social democrats who, along with the liberals, jointly run the parliament.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine changed all that. Taking advantage of the gulfs between Europe’s political institutions, von der Leyen has set a new course in defence, environmental and immigration policy without greatly offending the keenest European federalists or ruffling the feathers of progressives and conservatives. This has meant some manoeuvring. After her May 2020 economic recovery plan, she appeared to reorient the EU towards more sustainable development with the European Green Deal; but she recently backtracked after widespread opposition from her own political faction and the agricultural lobby. Considerations of her closeness to Bavarian farmers and French livestock breeders were clearly set to one side when she stood for the presidency.

Von der Leyen, who comes from an old patrician Hanseatic family, entered politics in the early 2000s, following in the footsteps of her father, who had been minister-president of Lower Saxony, vice-president of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and head of the EEC’s Directorate-General for Competition. She was raised with conservative values (saying grace at table) and went on to study at the London School of Economics, using a pseudonym to avoid Red Army Faction kidnapping threats. A qualified doctor, she is fluent in English and French, but has never been keen on mingling with the crowds, preferring horse riding to a beer with activists.

In contrast with her reportedly brusque manner with colleagues, a tendency to appoint close associates to key positions and an aloofness quite different from her predecessors’ relative geniality, von der Leyen is media-savvy to a degree unprecedented in this position. Since her time as Germany’s minister for family affairs in 2005, when she presented herself as a career woman and mother of seven, and promoted policies that encouraged women back to work, she knows how the media works and is ubiquitous in official photographs, to the point of intrusiveness, some European leaders feel.

Ineptitude behind the glossy veneer?

Covid and the Ukraine war ironically gave her an opportunity to enhance her image, despite a growing list of failures. Her term as Germany’s defence minister (2013-19) had already taken a similar course. Von der Leyen is a staunch believer in market efficiency and outsourcing, and, behind the glossy shots of her inspecting tanks, a scandal erupted over defence industry consultants appointed without proper oversight. The same blind faith coupled with a degree of ineptitude marked her management of vaccine procurement in 2021 (1). More recently, her obstinate pursuit of ineffective economic sanctions against Russia in part caused huge inflation in Europe and a German recession (see Russia: why the sanctions failed to bite, in this issue).

For, in one area, von der Leyen’s convictions trump her neoliberal beliefs: that is her hostility to Russia, which she believes to be the epitome of evil, and the threat that could ultimately unify Europe around democratic, liberal, Atlanticist values. Von der Leyen, in yellow jacket and sky blue blouse, has discreetly lobbied for Ukraine’s emergency EU admission, expressed anti-Russian and pro-NATO views near-daily, and seemingly taken control of European diplomacy, which is legally the prerogative of the European Council – in other words, of heads of state and government.

Here, von der Leyen backs the militaristic, bellicose stance of the Pentagon, the Baltic states and Poland rather than that of southern Europe. ‘The partnership von der Leyen has built with Biden is vital to her influence in Europe, and it has given the commission unprecedented status,’ the Financial Times commented (22-23 April 2023). She has never hidden her desire to steer NATO, an aspiration ironically hampered by her anti-Russia fixation, which is so pronounced that Chancellor Olaf Scholz feared it might ultimately harm Germany (2). Meanwhile her muted reaction to Israeli war crimes in Gaza contrasts with her pro-Ukrainian cheerleading.

This commitment to rearmament, a far cry from Europe’s traditional pacifist rhetoric, has taken concrete form through the European Defence Industrial Strategy and the proposal to create a new EU defence commissioner to represent a united front. Von der Leyen, having arrived promising peace, now embodies the return of Europe as a major power with a solid military arm, in which vast public subsidies enable the development of private industry in the service of European identity.

In the realm of identity and values, von der Leyen’s presidency has laid the groundwork for a new European political configuration that is increasingly frank about acknowledging profound and rapid ideological changes.

EU institutions have long viewed the rise of radical rightwing parties as their primary challenge, both in the European Parliament, with the steady ascent of nationalist and anti-European groups often referred to as ‘populists’, and especially within member states. In recent years, radical rightwing forces, previously confined to the margins, have imposed their agenda in several countries, sometimes taking control of national executives, such as Italy’s post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia; or joining governing coalitions, as in Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, and more recently the Netherlands and Croatia; or by providing confidence and supply, as in the case of the Sweden Democrats.

Convergence between rightwing groups

The recent European election confirmed the far right’s progress had not come at the expense of the mainstream right of the European People’s Party. So the EPP, the largest group in Strasbourg, can, depending on circumstances, either renew its informal coalition with the social democrats and centrists, or seek the support of the far right. Voting patterns in the European Parliament, as in national ones (in France, for example, with the immigration law) reveal ever more blurred boundaries between rightwing groups. The fact that those who are furthest to the right have shifted towards the centre on economic policy makes convergences easier; that was made plain by the recent rapprochement between von der Leyen and Giorgia Meloni.

The future as envisaged by Ursula von der Leyen possesses a certain clarity. Far from abandoning the framework again governing member states’ budgetary policies, the Europe of the future looks likely to continue to challenge the welfare state, again in the name of austerity, while spending public money lavishly on rearmament and technological innovation.

The Covid recovery phase is clearly over and the urgency of environmental transition is dropping down the priority list, due to the agricultural crisis created by inflation and Ukrainian imports. High levels of public debt and European industry’s increasing lack of competitiveness, particularly due to rising energy costs, elicit a predictable diagnosis: ‘Competitiveness must be the EU’s leitmotif for the coming years,’ as the European People’s Party recently proclaimed on its website. In other words, the European economy, undermined by excessive social costs, must push on with its structural reforms to avoid succumbing to global competition.

As a concession to the zeitgeist, the global free-trade discourse is accompanied by talk of tougher interventionism against global competitors’ unfair practices, especially the ‘distortions of the Chinese market’: ‘I have encouraged the Chinese government to address these structural overcapacities,’ von der Leyen said when Xi Jinping visited France in May 2024. Supporting European industrial sovereignty, an issue dear to Emmanuel Macron’s heart, has become policy for a more aggressive Europe on a global scale, a very different proposition from the enthusiasm for globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s.

Austerity and liberalisation at national level, timid legitimisation of protectionism at EU level, with a light dusting of green and even social policies, and above all huge military spending thus constitute the probable main focus of a second von der Leyen term, priorities shared by Europe’s main political forces. This khaki economy, in the absence of a green stimulus, already coexisted in 2022 with a new discourse on European identity, defined primarily in the negative as anti-Russian, anti-Chinese and anti-Islamic, each of these poles characterised by traits that varied according to the personalities, issues and events.

Which European particularity?

But appeasing ‘post-liberal’ forces and cementing the cohesion of an objectively diverse space, whether economically, politically or religiously, requires an even more powerful ideological driver: the affirmation of European civilisation’s particularity, even superiority, with that civilisation defined in deliberately hazy terms. Von der Leyen excels at this. Different political forces can recognise themselves in a discourse that keeps its options open between a ‘Europe of values’ (democratic, green and social) and an ‘ethnic-religious Europe’ – its definition implicit in several Central European countries and explicit among so-called ‘populist’ forces, such as the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS), a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group that von der Leyen has openly courted.

Two potentially opposing (yet in practice indivisible) conceptions of the EU therefore coexist thanks to von her Leyen’s practised ambiguity. In leftist and green traditions, even very moderate German ones, and even in ‘traditional’ Christian democracy, political Europe has no ethnic or religious anchor and is defined primarily by rights, with apparently no clear geographical limit. On this view, Europe could potentially stretch from the Atlantic to the Urals (or at least Odessa), even beyond, and in principle include a future ‘democratic’ Turkey, since it is preparing to admit predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On the other hand, the concrete reality of increasingly restrictive migration policies promoted by the principal figures, not least Meloni and von der Leyen, now defines a Europe closed to southern populations. In this conservative Europe, where proactive public action now equates with defence, traditional values centred on the family are gaining ground. ‘Ideologies, such as gender ideology, deny biological and social reality and undermine citizens’ identity,’ says the website of the ECR, which has ‘placed the plight of persecuted Christians prominently on the EU foreign policy agenda’. Paradoxically, the convergence of economic liberals with radical rightwingers makes this emerging European ideology closer to the fundaments of conservative nationalism, which has proved such fertile ground for leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and, in a different ideological-religious context, Narendra Modi.

In short, von der Leyen may have united several forces which often oppose one another at the national level through the magic of a pragmatic Euro-nationalist positioning. First, the so-called democrats, who are overrepresented in the West in professions with high cultural capital and who, facing the threat of ‘Russo-Chinese’ authoritarianism, project onto the world the fantasy of a ‘Europe of values’ (green, social and democratic). Then, the Islamophobic leaders and ideologues, who are ubiquitous in the public space. Next, the members of the working and middle classes, who blame migrants for their frustrations with neoliberal reforms and brutal inequalities. And finally, the economically dominant social groups and their intellectual and media supporters, who continue to drive the policies that destroy social cohesion.

This emerging ‘grand coalition’ of social and political forces was probably the real winner in the election on 9 June.