The same Ursula for a new five-years term

Photo: El Pais

The European Parliament elected Ursula von der Leyen (photo) for another five years as European Commission president, choosing stability and continuity for the EU’s most powerful institution and the bloc, POLITICO informs.

Von der Leyen, who hails from the centre-right European People’s Party, won 401 votes in a secret ballot, well above the 361 votes she needed to be elected. There were 284 votes in opposition, 15 abstentions and 7 votes declared invalid.

Von der Leyen had the backing of the three mainstream, pro-EU groups — the center-right European People’s Party, the Socialists and the liberals of Renew. In the weeks and months leading up to the vote, some lawmakers within those centrist groups said they would not vote for her, forcing her to look for support from outside her current coalition, including among the left-leaning Greens.

Now that von der Leyen has the support of both the European Council and the European Parliament, she will begin to assemble her new European Commission.

Ursula von der Leyen has released her political guidelines (that’s her Policy Program for the next five years). Seen by POLITICO, the document mentions several new commissioner roles, including defense; one “whose responsibilities will include housing” (the center-left had been calling for such a role); another “whose responsibilities will include ensuring intergenerational fairness”; a commissioner for equality; a fisheries and oceans commissioner; a commissioner for enlargement; and a commissioner for the Mediterranean.

The first policy priority von der Leyen highlighted during her speech was competitiveness and prosperity, and that’s no coincidence. It is set to be the focus of the next five years, with the climate agenda moving more toward the political background. More focus on competitiveness was also a key demand from her own political family, the European People’s Party.

Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to expand the European Green Deal with an ambitious 2040 climate target, a plan to prepare the European Union for the impacts of climate change, and a program to boost clean technology manufacturing if reelected by MEPs today.

She promises to enshrine a “90% emissions-reduction target for 2040 (?!)” in the bloc’s Climate Law, a key condition for the Greens, Socialists and Renew Europe to support her.

Von der Leyen also pledged to deliver a “Clean Industrial Deal… in the first 100 days of the mandate” in response to growing concerns over the competitiveness of Europe’s economy.  She also promised to reduce energy bills for people and companies by “moving further away from fossil fuels,” among other measures.

She dedicated a large part of her priority list to improving the EU’s preparedness against climate change, saying she would work on expanding the bloc’s emergency response capacity, draft a “European Climate Adaptation Plan” and a strategy to bolster Europe’s water security in the face of droughts and floods.

In her five-year plan, von der Leyen pushes for the European Commission to take on a bigger role in foreign policy, an area where EU countries normally take the lead. She calls it “a new economic foreign policy.”

The Economic Security Strategy that the Commission partially initiated in January will become one part of this. The Foreign Direct Investment Screening review will be “completed,” von der Leyen promises, and, she adds vaguely, the EU will “address risks from outbound investments.”

De-risking from China also falls under this pillar, although von der Leyen doesn’t mention the country by name, instead opting for references such as “those who are also strategic competitors and systemic rivals.”

The second pillar, trade, skips fully-fledged agreements but rather points to critical raw materials deals, WTO reform and trade defense measures. In fact, VDL’s plans don’t mention trade negotiations at all.

“It’s time to create a genuine European defense union,” Ursula von der Leyen said in French (no doubt she’s targeting an audience in Paris).

NATO remains the pillar of Europe’s collective defense, von der Leyen said, but European countries spend too little on their military and “spend too much abroad,” she added, in a reference to the overwhelming share of U.S. contractors in European defense procurement.

Europe should invest more in high-end defense capabilities, the German politician told MEPs, mentioning a European air defense shield — an idea she already floated earlier this year.

“Europe must move forward along the path mapped out by the Versailles Declaration,” von der Leyen said, in another nod at Paris.

Ursula von der Leyen said Thursday she would seek to “deter China” from invading Taiwan as part of her bid to run for a second term as European Commission president.

“The Indo-Pacific has become a decisive region for the world’s future,” she outlined in her manifesto entitled Europe’s Choice.

“We will work with Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Australia with whom we face common challenges… This includes our collective efforts to deploy the full range of our combined statecraft to deter China from unilaterally changing the status quo by military means, particularly over Taiwan,” she said, making her clearest statement to date.

The U.S. believes such a war could happen by 2027, which would be in the middle of von der Leyen’s potential second mandate.

The priority is to build up military capabilities. She called for more defense spending, but avoided hinting at controversial proposals such as defense bonds or redirecting EU funds for military expenditure, mentioning instead “incentivising private defense investment,” in particular the European Investment Bank.

The German politician also pledged to appoint a defense commissioner and present a white paper on defense in the next Commission’s first 100 days.

Ursula von der Leyen says her political guidelines present a “vision of a stronger Europe… that sticks to the targets of the European Green Deal with pragmatism, technology neutrality and innovation.”

That focus on “pragmatism” in green policymaking comes as priorities in Brussels move away from increasing environmental protections and toward competitiveness and security.

Her guidelines also float a new “Circular Economy Act” to help “create market demand for secondary materials and a single market for waste, notably in relation to critical raw materials.”

Ursula von der Leyen slammed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s trip to Russia, calling his “peace mission” an “appeasement mission.”

She didn’t name the Hungarian prime minister but Hungarian Ambassador Bálint Ódor was sitting in the room, with the camera directed at him while the European Parliament clapped her remarks.

Kirill Logvinov, Acting Permanent Representative of Russia to the EU, noted that von der Leyen does not hide his plans to militarize the European Union and turn the EU into the EOS, the European Defense Union. "The application for the transformation of the EU into the European Economic Area means the European Commission's interception of control over the entire European military—industrial complex with the complete reorientation of the European Economic Area economy to a long-term military confrontation with Russia," the diplomat stated.

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