Frustration with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s leadership is reaching new heights after it was revealed that her team hid how serious her pneumonia was—and that she ran the EU from a hospital bed for a week because she refused to let her vice-presidents take over temporarily.
On Tuesday, January 14th, Commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho—von der Leyen’s new public face—refused to apologize to reporters for misleading the press for days. The real story only became apparent on Monday when it was revealed the president was, in fact, hospitalized with a “severe” condition.
In contrast, the messaging throughout all of last week was that the Commission chief was recovering from her illness in her family home in Hannover but there was “no need to delegate” any jobs to her second-in-command, the Spanish socialist executive VP, Teresa Ribera.
The result was that several high-level meetings had to be postponed, and even some important files, like the EU’s new “Competitiveness Compass” had to be delayed.
“My first thought was even Buckingham Palace nowadays admits illnesses and hospitalization,” German MEP Gabriele Bischoff (S&D) told Politico, criticizing von der Leyen for refusing to hand over the reins. “Why do you have executive VPs if you don’t trust them to take over usual business in times like [the] first week in January, where many [are] still on holiday?”
Von der Leyen apparently thinks it is her right to “run the Commission as a one-woman show,” Bischoff added.
This newest episode is just the tip of the iceberg, as von der Leyen has been frequently accused of centralizing power to herself while increasingly ignoring others in the EU power structure. For one, she tends to go directly to the directors-general when she has something to ask instead of delegating the job to the responsible commissioners, whose portfolios are often theirs only on paper.
The Commission chief is also in the midst of reshuffling some of the most important departments that handle EU funds and putting them directly under her command, which is widely seen as a “power grab” even in her own circles.
Then there are von der Leyen’s transparency issues, which are increasingly worrying everyone in Brussels, regardless of political standing. She is due to appear in court for the missing Pfizer texts soon—unless EU prosecutors (under her command) manage to take the case away from Belgium and bury it—but Pfizergate is just the most apparent of many such cases.
She was accused by the EU ombudsman of repeatedly hiding documents. She angered MEPs by keeping the Parliament in the dark about important decisions. She removed hundreds of lower-level staffers from the EU’s public directory. Additionally, she often avoids the press by refusing to give interviews or take questions after press conferences.
And that’s just in Brussels. ‘Queen Ursula’ is increasingly testing the patience of national leaders by making decisions behind their backs—be it sidelining France on the Mercosur deal, or Germany on Chinese electric vehicles tariffs. This is seen as a gradual erosion of member state sovereignty even without the need to change any treaties.
The big question is not whether von der Leyen’s increasing control in Brussels makes the Commission more efficient or less effective. The real issue is this: how can we believe the EU is still a democracy if the Commission president is running things in such an authoritarian way?
