This is Yves. Our Nick Corbishley has often criticized Ursula von der Leyen’s corruption and her willingness to promote predictably bad neoliberal/neoconservative political ideas. But his imminent reinstallation at the head of the White House the queen of Europe The President of the European Commission offers a new opportunity to revisit her dismal record. An indicator of her incompetence: she has managed to make her predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker look good.
And please welcome our new contributor George Georgiou. If you’re nice to him, maybe he’ll submit more posts.
By George Georgiou, an economist who worked for many years at the Central Bank of Cyprus, where he held various senior positions, including head of the governor’s office during the financial crisis.
To be accused of impropriety once may be considered a misfortune, but to be accused four times looks like negligence. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde)
If there is one person who symbolizes the ineptitude of the European Commission more than anyone else, it is the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen (hereinafter VDL).
Questions about VDL’s lack of probity first surfaced in 2015, when she was accused of plagiarizing her doctoral thesis. She was ultimately cleared of these accusations, but as the BBC reported on March 9, 2016, the president of Hannover’s medical faculty, Christopher Baum, acknowledged that “Ms. von der Leyen’s thesis did indeed contain elements plagiarized,” but he added “there was no plagiarism.” intention to deceive.” His first lucky escape.
VDL’s lack of integrity continued when she was German Minister of Defence between 2013 and 2019. During her tenure in the ministry, she was embroiled in a scandal involving €250 million in payments to consultants related to arms contracts. The German Federal Audit Office found that of the €250 million declared for consulting fees, only €5.1 million had been spent. Furthermore, one of the consultants was McKinsey & Company, in which VDL’s son was a partner, raising a potential conflict of interest. It also emerged that messages related to the contracts had been deleted from two of VDL’s mobile phones. Although she was eventually cleared of the corruption allegations, questions remain to this day about her integrity during this period.
After surviving two scandals, VDL could not believe its eyes when in July 2019, Macron and Merkel bypassed the Spitzenkadidaten process and appointed her to succeed Jean-Claude Junker as head of the European Commission. THE Spitzenkadidaten The process by which the lead candidate emerges and is then ratified by the European Parliament is itself somewhat obscure. In VDL’s case, she was lucky that the EU could not agree on either of the two main candidates at the time, Martin Weber and Frans Timmermans. It was therefore left to the perfect arranger, Macron, and VDL’s mentor, Merkel, to reach an agreement using this great democratic and transparent tool called a “backstage deal”. VDL’s appointment was accepted by the European Council and on July 16, the European Parliament voted in favor of his appointment. But the vote was close. Out of a total of 747 MEPs, only 383 voted for, 327 voted against, 22 abstained and one vote was invalid. Under EU rules, the Commission president must be elected with more than 50% of the votes of MEPs. Thus, she only received 9 votes more than the threshold. Compare that to his predecessor, Juncker, who received 422 votes in 2014.
After being appointed president of the European Commission, VDL once again found itself embroiled in controversy, this time involving the purchase of the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer. The scandal, which the media dubbed Pfizergate, involved the purchase of 1.8 billion doses of the Pfizer vaccine for use across the EU. It turned out that: a) the number of doses was far greater than necessary, necessitating the destruction or donation of a significant number of doses; b) excess doses cost the EU 4 billion euros; c) the total value of the contract, estimated by Politico at around 20 billion euros, has been inflated; and d) the most damaging accusation, the contract for the vaccines was negotiated directly between VDL and Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer. The negotiations were conducted using SMS messages, which VDL later claimed to have deleted.
The New York Times, which initially led the investigation into Pfizergate, filed a lawsuit against the European Commission for not providing access to the text message conversations between VDL and Bourla. In Belgium, a lobbyist, Frédéric Baldan, filed a criminal complaint for corruption and destruction of documents. The Belgian trial was eventually taken over by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which opened a criminal investigation. The outcome of these legal proceedings/investigations is still awaited.
One would have thought that the reckless VDL would have learned a lesson from all these transgressions, but it seems that nothing will stand in the way of Ursula and a good scandal. Which brings us to her latest irregularity, cronyism. In January this year, VDL appointed Martin Pieper, another CDU politician, to the newly created and lucrative position of special envoy for SMEs. The appointment was reported by La Matinale Européenne in February, but it was not until April that the controversy surrounding the appointment was widely covered by the English-language media.
The appointment was controversial for two reasons: 1) the recruitment process was flawed and 2) Pieper’s choice was seen as politically motivated. On the first point, an anonymous European official revealed that there were two other candidates, one from Sweden and one from the Czech Republic, who performed better than Pieper during the recruitment process.
On the second point, there were strong suspicions that Pieper had been chosen by VDL in order to curry favor with the CDU and thus gain its support for her reappointment as head of the European Commission. This appointment sparked a strong reaction from other members of the Commission and MEPs. Four high commissioners, including Joseph Borrell and Internal Market Commissioner Thiery Breton, wrote to VDL on March 27 to express their concern about the lack of transparency and impartiality of the appointment. On April 11, MEPs voted by 382 votes to 144 to cancel Pieper’s nomination. Although the vote was not binding on the Commission, Pieper’s position became untenable and on April 16 he resigned. In the words of Daniel Freund, German/Green MEP, reported on Euronews, it was “sad and shameful”. He added: “I don’t know how you can explain it to voters.”
At the time of writing, Euronews reported that an agreement had been reached for its renewal. It is unclear when the European Parliament will vote for it, but it will likely be later this week. The exact date is a trivial question. What is not insignificant is that the renewal of the VDL mandate for another 5 years, despite all the irregularities mentioned above, would confirm what many have been advocating for some time, namely that the EU needs of radical reform. EU citizens must see that European institutions are much more transparent, accountable and democratic.
