02/19/2024 12:18 pm (current 02/19/2024 12:20 pm)
Wants to remain head of the European Commission: Ursula von der Leyen ©APA/dpa
Ursula von der Leyen seeks a second term as President of the EU Commission. The CDU politician explained this on Monday at a party leadership meeting in Berlin, the German Press Agency learned from the CDU's federal executive council. The position of President of the European Commission must be filled after the European elections in June. As a general rule, a candidate from the best-performing European party family in EU elections is nominated.
In the polls, the European People's Party (EPP), which also includes the CDU and the ÖVP, is clearly ahead. There is therefore a good chance that von der Leyen will continue to be president.
Von der Leyen's tenure so far has been shaped mainly by the Corona crisis and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. During the pandemic, the European Commission organized, among other things, the joint procurement of vaccines and developed a huge program to rebuild the economy.
The leader of the FPÖ delegation in the EU Parliament, Harald Vilimsky, reacted with displeasure to the renewal of the appointment of the German CDU politician. Von der Leyen “has driven centralization in Brussels at the expense of member state sovereignty like no European Commission president before her,” Vilimsky said in a press release. The liberal MEP thinks he can already identify the priorities for a second term of the President of the European Commission: “With the expansion of the EU to include Ukraine at war, there should be a fundamental reform of the entire Union, which wants to transfer even more competences from Member States to Brussels.” Von der Leyen should therefore not “have a second chance to harm Europe”.
Before moving to Brussels, von der Leyen was, among other things, German Defense Minister in the government of then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU). A mother of seven children, born in Brussels in 1958, she has a doctorate in medicine and also served as German family minister and labor minister.
The election of the PPE candidate for the top position is scheduled to take place at a party congress on March 7th. It is certain that von der Leyen will receive the necessary majority of votes there. Possible opposing candidates are not yet known.
According to information from the German Press Agency, one of the focuses of Ursula von der Leyen's election campaign will be the EU's competitiveness. With the current Commission, it has recently initiated, among other things, a procedure that could be used to take action against China's massively subsidized electric cars. Von der Leyen also supports the idea of appointing a European defense commissioner. If she remained President of the Commission, she would appoint a Defense Commissioner, the German politician said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference.