This month, Ursula von der Leyen will begin the second year of her second term as President of the European Commission. A period during which he had to overcome motions of censure in the European Parliament and a stage marked above all by his silence. An extraño silence from the main representative of the European Union, obliged to defend the fundamental principles of the EU, on the ground before the Russian attack on Ukraine, in front of the position of the United States in the negotiations with Putin and the Russian refusal of European participation. However, diplomatic activity within the EU is enormous. Just follow the legacy of the French president, Emmanuel Macron’s continued travels across Europe, China and part of Africa; German annuller Friedrich Merz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined the European group, even though his country left the EU almost five years ago, in February 2020. Von der Leyen will lead nowhere if she is the protagonist of these movements, as can be expected in her capacity as Commission President.
However, he has a powerful weapon to intervene in the negotiations: in Europe, Russian funds have been blocked as sanctions for the aggression against Ukraine. This is a figure of around 193 billion euros which, made available to kyiv, both to continue armament and to try to recover the electrical system, among other things, would allow it to arrive at the negotiating table with something more powerful than what it presents today. The problem is that Von der Leyen failed to convince Belgium, the country in which these funds are deposited, and he does not want to open the box, even if it is only worth an initial 93 billion dollars, because in the future an international court will force him to return this money. The President of the Commission fails to convince Belgium that, in this case, the risk would be shared by all the member countries of the Union. The discussion continues and somehow confirms Von der Leyen’s lack of strength. The President of the Commission will have to redouble her efforts in the months to come to regain a more decisive role if her group, the European People’s Party, does not end up reflecting on a major subject.
Von der Leyen also failed to force Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to respect European standards for press freedom and judicial independence. As journalist Ivan Zolt denounced, “a media conglomerate run by Orbán’s allies, known as Fundación de Prensa y Media de Comunicación de Europa Central (KESMA), controls almost 500 media outlets, all of which echo every government statement, and there is state propaganda, in favor of Putin or the vilest discredit campaign against Orbán’s enemies.” Whoever is not with them is against them: independent media failed to get answers to their questions, were kicked out of the streets of the government press and removed state advertising from their pages (oddly enough, a strategy very similar to that following President Trump in the United States, although some media outlets have begun to submit legal demands, for example against the Ministry of Defense, which prohibits journalists from attending press conferences of the The New York Times). The role of the President of the Commission cannot be more extensive. It was ultimately the European Parliament that forced the Commission to refer Hungary (and also Poland) to the Court of Justice of the European Union for violations of the fundamental rights of LGBTIQ people.
The French philosopher Barbara Cassin, in an interview published in the magazine The Great Continentif you don’t hear enough talk: the first condition for resisting the speeches of Trump and Putin is not to be stunned; Monday, nothing will happen. “We have to decide what we see and what we want; but today we don’t see enough people speaking out. We should remain insensitive to comments against Trump and Putin.” And the first to speak should be Ursula von der Leyen, as the first representative of the European Union. Maybe in 2026.
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