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For a politician who won’t say if she plans to run for reelection, Ursula von der Leyen sure sounds a lot like a candidate.
Her State of the European Union speech, delivered Wednesday morning in Strasbourg, was as close as you can get to a campaign launch short of unveiling a “Make Europe Great Again” baseball cap — down to the way she handed out political gifts to every group that would have a say in her reelection.
Take her rather blatant outreach to European conservatives.
While the choice of who becomes the next Commission president will ultimately be made by European heads of state and government sometime next summer, von der Leyen still needs to lock in support from her own political family, the European People’s Party (EPP).
It’s the biggest political group in the European Parliament and is likely to remain so after the election in June, despite big losses since 2019.
Von der Leyen did not disappoint her brethren.
Tossing out red meat to conservatives who have been waging guerilla warfare in Parliament against the Commission’s Green Deal environmental program, von der Leyen said: “As we enter the next phase of the European Green Deal, one thing will never change: We will keep supporting European industry throughout this transition.”
In other words: Worry not, fellow conservatives. Even if Brussels says it wants to ban the combustion engine by 2035, I’ll find a way of keeping your carmakers and heavy industry in business.
The Commission chief also had some choice words for EPP chief Manfred Weber, the Bavarian politician who has become a major headache for von der Leyen ever since he started attacking Brussels’ environmental policies and championing the European farmer.
Switching to German, von der Leyen said: “I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to our farmers. I am and remain convinced that agriculture and protection of the natural world can go hand in hand.”
The overture to Europe’s conservatives did not go unnoticed. Thanasis Bakolas, secretary general of the EPP, lauded her speech in a tweet as a “testament to the leadership, determination, pragmatism, effectiveness and resolve of @EPP in the EU institutions and across Europe.”
Reacting from the Parliament floor, Weber was somewhat less effusive, insisting on what he said was the need to create a “European defense union” — a topic that hadn’t rated a mention from von der Leyen. But he managed to summon some praise for her approach to enlargement: “Yes, Ursula, the enlargement process is key and we support your concept towards Western Balkan, Ukraine, and Moldova,” he said.
The Commission chief had also packed gifts for the two other big political groups whose support she’d need to win reelection: French President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal Renew Europe group, and the Socialists and Democrats of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
The biggest one was for Macron. As first reported by POLITICO, Paris has been pushing hard for the Commission to open an anti-subsidy investigation against imported Chinese electric vehicles. Other countries met the push from Paris with skepticism.
But von der Leyen — who owes her current job, in large part, to Macron — brushed aside their concerns and said: “I can announce today that the Commission is launching an anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles coming from China. Europe is open for competition. Not for a race to the bottom.”
The taking was less fruitful for the socialists, though some will find comfort in von der Leyen’s pledge to stick by the main pillars of the Green Deal and reform the legal framework for migration into the European Union.
And then there is the important matter of what von der Leyen did not say, especially on the vexing topic of rule-of-law inside the Union. Brussels is locked in a battle of wills, and lawyers, with the populist right-wing governments of Hungary and Poland, both of which have repeatedly and openly defied the authority of European judges.
But von der Leyen omitted to mention the name of either country during the rule-of-law passages in her speech. That could be down to temporary memory loss — or a simple calculation that she is better off avoiding a viral video clip of her criticizing two countries whose support she’ll need in Council to win a second term in the Berlaymont.
Three diplomats noted that von der Leyen had “played it safe” in her final State of the European Union.
One added laconically: “It’s an election year, after all.”
A veteran conservative who watched the speech came away with the feeling that von der Leyen was not just considering a bid for reelection. She was already on the campaign trail.
“It was all ends up a campaign speech,” said Dara Murphy, a former campaign director for the EPP and now senior adviser at Rasmussen Global. “There’s now no doubt” that she will run, although, he added: “She won’t publicly declare anything.”
Sarah Wheaton and Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.
