In July 2025, a flummoxed EU budget commissioner was in the hot seat at the European Parliament. Piotr Serafin had already shown up four hours late for his presentation of the European Commission’s proposal for the 2028-2035 long-term European Union budget. As MEPs peppered him with questions, it became clear that he didn’t have the answers. The budget commissioner didn’t seem to know what was in his own budget proposal.
Meanwhile, down the street, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was presenting the proposal to journalists at a press conference at the commission headquarters known as the Berlaymont. But the numbers didn’t add up. The percentages on the graph behind her added to 101 percent. As the increasingly confused and frustrated journalists asked her questions about what was in the budget, the visibly tired president kept returning to her script, citing numbers that didn’t make sense.
For Brussels insiders, the widespread feeling was that the shambolic budget roll-out was the fault of the controlling leadership style of von der Leyen and her powerful chief of staff, Bjoern Seibert. The 26 commissioners in von der Leyen’s college (one from each EU member state, apart from Germany which she represents) had been kept largely out of the loop during the budget drafting process. According to an inside source, each commissioner was only told about their own budget envelope but not given the overall figures until immediately before they were asked to vote on approving the proposal.
This is the way Seibert has run things, keeping commissioners in the dark until the last minute, sometimes even on files they are ostensibly in charge of. Von der Leyen’s right-hand man reportedly even insists on signing off on every public pronouncement made by every commissioner, leading to delays and demoralization. A small cabal of mostly German officials surrounding von der Leyen run the show. And that likely led to the embarrassing scene of a budget commissioner not knowing what was in his own budget.
A College of Yes Men and Women
This style has led to the president’s nickname of “Queen Ursula”—privately used by grumbling officials within the European Commission. For them, the budget presentation fiasco was emblematic of a leadership style that has led to commission dysfunction, with disempowered commissioners increasingly treated as the “faceless bureaucrats” of EU stereotype.
Commissioners are nominated by each national government but have to be approved by the president and confirmed by the parliament. Von der Leyen reportedly chose to approve nominees she knew wouldn’t challenge her authority, and she successfully lobbied French President Emmanuel Macron to ditch his nominee Thierry Breton, the digital commissioner who had become a thorn in von der Leyen’s side during her first term. Breton was replaced with little-known Stéphane Séjourné, who served as French foreign minister from January to September 2024 and who has been relegated to an important-sounding but ultimately powerless position.
Von der Leyen has successfully rid herself of all the commissioners who had posed a challenge to her in her first term: Frenchman Breton, but also Dutchman Frans Timmermans and Dane Margrethe Vestager. In her second term, she has only given significant responsibilities to her trusted loyalists: Slovak Maroš Šefčovič, Latvian Valdis Dombrovskis, and Dutchman Wopke Hoekstra. Those who might present her with a challenge, such as Spaniard Teresa Ribeira, have been sidelined. The result has been a college of yes men and yes women, with all policy seemingly devised from von der Leyen’s office and then passed down to the commissioners leading that policy area for their rubber stamp.
Rare and Not Exclusive
The president’s controlling style has also extended to her press interactions. She gives almost no interviews, and when she ventured down to the press room to present her budget proposal, it was one of the few times she had ever set foot in it. Journalists have long complained about her lack of availability. In September it emerged that an “exclusive” interview with von der Leyen that ran in six European newspapers was not the result of a face-to-face meeting but rather a document of written answers under her name distributed to the press. Belgium’s Le Soir, one of the newspapers that participated, blew the whistle on how it was conducted. Spanish newspaper El País refused to participate or publish the piece because of the strict conditions imposed by the commission, according to reports.
The tight control around the release of information by the president’s office was also on display in January 2025, when it was revealed that she had been in hospital with pneumonia for a week without informing the public. During her absence, her spokespeople had insisted that she was fine and carrying out her duties. While she was hospitalized, she did not delegate authority to anyone else at the commission.
From General Ursula to Queen Ursula
Von der Leyen already had a reputation for being both hard-working and controlling during her time in German politics. Von der Leyen is no stranger to Brussels, having been born there in 1958 while her father Ernst Albrecht worked for the then fledgling European Commission. But the family did not stay long and later returned to Hanover, where she studied economics and medicine. She didn’t enter politics until she had already started her large family of seven children, joining the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in her 30s. Rising quickly under Chancellor Angela Merkel, she held the cabinet posts of family affairs and labor before becoming Germany’s first female defense minister in 2013.
It was at the defense ministry that von der Leyen earned a reputation for tight management and, detractors argued, secrecy. Determined to modernize the Bundeswehr after years of underfunding, she centralized decision-making in her office and insisted on strict message discipline. Supporters say that focus was necessary in a bureaucracy long resistant to change. But parliamentary investigators later criticized a culture of opacity, citing incomplete records and limited transparency around lucrative consulting contracts.
In 2019, after a marathon EU summit, she was plucked from relative obscurity by French President Emmanuel Macron, who suggested her as a consensus choice after leaders could not agree on who to appoint as commission president. Her first term was one of crisis management, a time when few would question that a top-down management style is helpful. As commission president, she had to oversee the European Union’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, failing Brexit negotiations, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In all three cases she drew praise for her decisive action.
Only Limited Leadership
But in the changed circumstances of her second term, which started in December 2024 at the dawn of a new era of global strongman politics, critics say von der Leyen’s penchant for institutional control but political timidity is not working well for the EU. At a time when the European Council of the 27 national leaders is suffering from a leadership vacuum, President von der Leyen has chosen not to assert her authority among them.
“Why is she Queen Ursula here at the commission, but servant Ursula when she’s across the street at the European Council?” grumbled one commission official after a June 2025 council summit where the president dutifully took leaders’ instructions to surrender to US President Donald Trump on his trade war extortion. “If she put even a quarter of the effort she puts into controlling the commission into leading Europe, we could go toe to toe with Trump,” the official said.
Though some see the commission president position as simply the head of a civil service who must execute the instructions of national leaders, the reality is that she heads the EU’s executive branch and several of her predecessors have chosen to lead the council rather than follow it. That includes the legendary European Commission President Jacques Delors who spearheaded the transformation of the intergovernmental European Community into the confederal European Union in the early 1990s.
With a lame duck French president, a distracted German chancellor, and a new Council President António Costa, who has no desire to challenge von der Leyen’s authority, she could easily step in to lead the leaders. She could have used her bully pulpit to galvanize the national leaders into defending Europe by using the EU’s anti-coercion instrument against the US and hit back with retaliatory tariffs. Instead, she chose to keep silent at that June 2025 summit, and to sign a humiliating surrender deal with Donald Trump in Scotland a month later.
The Face of Surrender
Now, von der Leyen has become the face of EU surrender, of a union powerless in the face of ever-growing global threats. It is an ironic position to be in for someone who has been so obsessed with amassing power within the institution she controls. And now she is even caving in to demands from national leaders and her center-right European People’s Party (EPP) group to undo large swathes of the EU Green Deal—a signature policy accomplishment of her first term.
She may also be about to cave in to US pressure to dilute the digital rules passed during her first term. “While she bullies in the Berlaymont, she allows herself to be bullied by Europe’s short-sighted national leaders and the world’s strongmen,” observed the official, who said she had been cowed by both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu. She has thus attracted both resentment within the EU institutions for her controlling style and outside of the institutions for a perceived failure to show the same resolve when it comes to dealing with the outside world.
As a result, von der Leyen is being subjected to an unprecedented number of no-confidence votes in the European Parliament. She survived the first vote in July, after the center-left flirted with but did not join a censure motion by the far right over her handling of COVID-19 vaccine procurement. Now she faces two more no-confidence motions in the coming months. One, from the far left, focuses on her “deal” with Trump and her walk-back of Green Deal laws. That motion could conceivably reach the two-thirds majority needed to bring her down if it is supported by the center left, the Greens, and the far right. After July’s failed censure motion, center-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group leader Iratxe Garcia warned von der Leyen it was her “absolute last chance” before they might withdraw their support for her.
Dave Keating is an American journalist based in Brussels covering European politics for France24.
