Vaccines and Recovery Fund: Ursula von der Leyen's 'Express' Legacy

Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman to chair the European Commission, has managed to accumulate in less than two years a legacy that some of her predecessors did not achieve in a decade.

The covid-19 pandemic, which began just two months after the German conservative took office, threatened to ruin her tenure.

But the President of the Commission has managed to turn the crisis around with three initiatives - recovery fund, vaccine campaign and digital certificate - which already guarantee her a prominent place in the history of the European Union.

The community leader will take stock this Wednesday during her speech on the state of the Union before the European Parliament.

His intervention will address the challenges ahead, from the explosive geopolitical situation after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban to the continuation of a fight against the covid-19 virus.

But despite the difficulties that await him in 2022, Von der Leyen will reach the prime of his five-year term with the peace of mind that he has easily passed the tests of an unprecedented health, economic and social period in the history of the EU. .

And knowing that, at least for now, he has strong support not only from his political group (the European People's Party), but also from socialists and liberals.

More information

• EU requires Taliban to open humanitarian corridors to neighboring countries

• The EU reaches 70% of the adult population vaccinated against covid-19

"Von der Leyen has played a very positive role in the response to the pandemic," says the leader of the socialist group in the European Parliament, MEP Iratxe García.

"A measure such as the recovery plan includes many of the demands that we had been raising for years and that seemed unattainable to us," he acknowledges.

This fund will inject 800 billion euros into the European economy to try to compensate for the tremendous damage caused by the pandemic to the productive, economic and social fabric of the EU. For the first time in the club's history, the financing of these aids, including those that are non-refundable, will be done with a joint debt issue backed by the 27 member states. This is an unprecedented step towards the strength of the euro as an international benchmark in financial markets and turns the European Commission, in charge of placing the debt, into the embryo of a possible Treasury for the euro zone.

The vaccine strategy launched by Von der Leyen without even having clear competencies for it also marks a milestone towards the health union that could emerge in response to the pandemic.

The President of the Commission led a joint program of dose purchases that prevented countries with more resources - such as Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands - from launching a joint purchase outside the EU that could have monopolized most vials available.

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Von der Leyen's third goal since the pandemic began was just as unexpected. The president insisted on the establishment of a digital certificate for the covid that would facilitate mobility within the EU, allowing users to easily demonstrate in any country of the club if they have been vaccinated, have passed a test or have passed the disease.

"It seemed impossible to me that the certificate would go ahead and even less in a record time of just four months," confesses a veteran diplomat who participated in the negotiation of the legislative project. In the Commission itself, according to sources within the agency, there were voices in favor of opting for a simple recommendation, which would allow each government to decide whether to introduce or recognize the certificate. "But Von der Leyen demanded to go all out to prevent the project from crashing against the free interpretation of each capital," recall community sources. The certificate came into effect on July 1,with an interoperable digital verification system between the 27 Member States and is on its way to becoming an essential safe-conduct and a technological precedent for possible harmonization of official documents throughout the EU.

Another positive element is the closing of the cooperation and trade agreement with London, which ended Brexit on December 31.

Or the approval of the so-called Climate Law, a text that has made the carbon dioxide neutrality targets for 2050 binding.

Nothing anticipated this series of successes when Von der Leyen arrived in Brussels catapulted from the German Ministry of Defense, where his management aroused continuous criticism.

The German arrived at the community capital of rebound, after the vetoes crossed in the European Council frustrated the aspirations to chair the Commission of the conservative German Manfred Weber and the Dutch socialist Frans Timmermans.

Von der Leyen was greeted with obvious discomfort in the European Parliament, given that he had not even participated in the European elections from which the President of the Commission was supposed to leave.

The German conservative narrowly saved the investiture vote, with 382 votes in favor, 327 against and 22 abstentions.

After several setbacks in the formation of his team, which included the rejection by Parliament of the person chosen by France as European Commissioner, Von der Leyen managed to take over from Jean-Claude Juncker on December 1, 2019, a month later than as planned.

The new president, who had a small apartment built in the Commission building to live next to her office, aroused serious reluctance among the agency's officials.

The criticisms pointed to their ignorance of the political and administrative culture of the Commission, their almost exclusive trust in a small group of Germans who also arrived suddenly from Berlin, and their tendency to impose their criteria with little respect for the collegiality that is supposed to. reign among the commissioners.

In the environment of the president, it is recognized that she has a certain presidential character and that power has been increasingly centralized in the Berlaymont, the building where Von der Leyen lives and works.

But they assure that this trend already began more than a decade ago, during the terms of José Manuel Durão Barroso (2004-2014).

The alleged isolation of Von der Leyen and his closest team is attributed his most serious mistakes. He was on the verge of causing a serious incident with London by invoking a precept of the Brexit agreements to prevent the exit of vaccines from the EU across the border between Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland. The mishap was corrected in a matter of hours and the measure never had a real effect. But the Boris Johnson executive seized on that slip to blame Brussels for the renewed tension in Ulster and the damage that Brexit has caused to the coexistence between the two parts of the Irish island. Some sources point out that Von der Leyen could have saved a skidding size if he had consulted more openly with the other members of the Commission.

The vaccination campaign also started with stumbling blocks. Von der Leyen announced at the end of 2020 with great fanfare the start of the punctures after the joint purchase, but both she and the rest of the Commission seemed to ignore the arrival of the supply. Around the Christmas holidays it was clear that, unlike in the UK and the US, in Europe the vaccination campaigns were not taking off and the vials had not yet arrived. Von der Leyen took action on the matter and after several pressure measures on pharmaceutical companies, the torrent of doses began to flow, especially from April 2021.

The president of the Commission is now gambling the success of the rest of her mandate around very thorny files.

On the table, a migration pact that displeases front-line countries such as Spain, Italy or Greece, considering that it burdens them with the entire task of managing irregular entries, and that takes on new meaning in the face of the foreseeable humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.

In his speech this Wednesday he is also expected to speak of common defense, another eternal claim of the EU.

It has become a centerpiece of the debate on strategic autonomy after the scare of the Central Asian hornet's nest and the realization of the military dependence on the United States and NATO.

Since then, Brussels has resurrected the idea of ​​a community rapid response battalion staffed with 5,000 soldiers.

The future will not be easy. In less than two weeks, he will lose the support of his mentor, Angela Merkel, following the September 26 elections in Germany. The support of the Chancellor and the French President, Emmanuel Macron, have been crucial to the success of the President of the Commission. A circumstance that, by the way, relates her to one of her great predecessors. Jacques Delors, considered until now the best president of the organization, also knew how to exploit the complicity with the leaders of the Franco-German axis of his time (Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand). Perhaps Delors's turn has come to share his historic throne with the first woman to chair the Commission.

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