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From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on-vaccine-exports-to-northern-ireland-trigger-diplomatic-row https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on... Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macron-coronavirus-vaccine-exports-eu-controlled https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro... It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.

Hunisgung 6y ago
I know people at the European Medecines Agency that were angry at Ursula von der Leyen in December because she was always making public announcements (about the beginning and speed of the vaccination campaign) with no regard for the reality of regulatory activities or manufacturing and logistics constraints.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I'm also pro-EU,remainer,etc. The problem is that the EU is the political graveyard, because countries send the most absurd people there. Not all of them,of course,but a lot. EU works when things are going slow and because of the sheer economical scale and power, everybody takes it serious when it comes to negotiations. But the EC isn't a bunch of experts on rapid situations. It's exactly the same when a French civil servant complained that they are being outbid when buying masks, because the state can't pay upfront, while the Americans ( individuals) could,so essentially a 60 million people country ended up competing against a few individuals with cash. Same with vaccines: while the EK were trying to come up with something, Israelis already were calling around the globe to make sure they get it first.
- pelasaco 6y ago
  thats true. At least in Germany, you are just sent to the EU Parlament if you re not performing well in the country level.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - petre 6y ago
    Except von der Leyen was sent in as head of the Comission, a position which is essentially the Prime Minister of the EU. The PM's or the head of the Comission's job is to get sh*t done, as opposed to bragging about it and passing the responsability and the blame onto others. Sorry to say but BJ is way better in this regard. He has delivered Brexit and the UK is in a much better position regarding vaccinations.
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      BJ and DT.
    - estaseuropano 6y ago
      Yes Legen is a bit like an EU prime minister, but she doesn't have the same prerogatives. The EU has the ultimate authority only on a narrow number of economic issues, but e.g. on borders and health it needs to get the agreement of 27 goverents to act. The EU is a compromise machine designed to manage the expectations and needs of 27 countries, not a presidential system where a Trump or Putin can sign executive decisions changing laws with the stroke of a pen. So Johnson or Trump as heads of the commission would likely manage to do better publicity-wise but I doubt they could get much faster results.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        That's incorrect. The EU is a presidential system where the head of the Commission (vDL) can and just did change laws at the stroke of a pen. She has far more power than Trump because Trump could be blocked by Congress and Congress can make its own laws to which Trump is subservient. The EU Commission is the ultimate source of all EU law, with the Parliament being not actually a parliament at all (it can't change the law!). An example of the EU changing the law on a whim was the regulations just published on Friday that imposed a border on Northern Ireland, the thing they just spent the last 4 years claiming would be terrible and provoke terrorist violence which is why the UK would have to basically 'lose' NI as territory. It could happen without Ireland or the UK even being consulted exactly because the EU is constitutionally a dictatorship of the Commission.
wrnr 6y ago
No way UK is to blame for this, just pure arrogance of narcissistic EU commission trowing a temper tantrum about how it can't possibly be even wrong after having grabbed all responsibility for delivering the vaccine because it was her moment to shine after the brexit, and then start pointing fingers at the first set back.
- helij 6y ago
  No one blamed UK. This blame thing is completely made up by UK media.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Not just UK media, German media as well. But maybe not to yhe same extent.
  - xenoph0n 6y ago
    lol, the EU is publicly doing it and there are people in this thread doing it.
peteretep 6y ago
> Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program But let us be clear that it isn’t, and they are not.
- jackTheMan 6y ago
  Do you know how many doses UK is getting over the same period? Does UK also missing 60% of their contract or they are prioritized?
  - wbillingsley 6y ago
    AZ set up a separate supply chain in each major jurisdiction. As I understand it, the EU interfered in its member countries' contracts, delayed them 3 months, delaying the EU supply chain from starting. Ridiculously, from what I can see, in the contract the EU specifically stated they could only supply a few early doses from the UK in 2020 (because after Jan 1 the UK is outside the EU and they are not permitted to use non-EU production) and have then been trying to make spurious claims they're supposed to divert UK doses nearly a month afterwards. Sorry to say it looks like EU Commission incompetence layered on some more EU Commission incompetence.
    - estaseuropano 6y ago
      The EU didn't interfere in any contracts. Some countries were moving ahead but the small ones were scared to be left out in the cold so pushed for it to be done by the EU instead of the big countries. Then once it was in the EU decision process some individual countries slower the agreement process with worries about price, ... Either way Brussels would get the blame - as too expensive, buying the wrong ones, not managing to agree quick enough, etc. But it's not as if someone in the commission just said and twiddled thumbs, they were negotiating, then convincing countries to agree, negotiating again, ... It's easy to point at 'the EU' but the Brussels institutions were asked to do it, rather than took this from someone. The countries were probably happy to have someone to blame later. What I would love to know is which country held things up in council - as the article says, some were doubting mRNA vaccines and others tried to go cheaper and that was the reason for the delay.
freeflight 6y ago
Leyen failing upwards is a pretty accurate description of her political career in Germany. She was never popular, one of her first "big ideas", as the head of the ministry for families, was to introduce DNS Internet-censorship against child pornography, which ultimately failed due to the public backlash. Like many other German career politicians, her doctors dissertation was found to be partly plagiarized. Her changes to the family allowances were across the board unpopular: High income couples profited the most from these changes, while middle and lower income classes lost out. There's even an active committee of inquiry still going on into her habit of hiring external, private, consultants to do the work for her at ministries. As a response to that she had the data on her mobile phone deleted, official files illegally redacted, and other data, that could be used as evidence, straight up deleted. For many Germans she's the definition of what's wrong with German politics because she didn't get where she is out of her own abilities, but rather as a consequence of her family having had that kind of influence in Germany for generations [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  She is a product of the CDU - which promotes based on internal networks, not quality results. I would say she's not one of the worst politicians - everyone with that length in public life has a few scandals. I haven't forgiven her for her censorship laws, but the other 'scandals' seem rather be a matter of hubris (often confused with 'vision'). In other countries that's a normal expectation - new policies such as on childcare will have some birthing problems - but in germany politicians usually have waited for a solid plan before they announce big measures.
  - monopoledance 6y ago
    I think Alice Schwarzer's words seeded some doubt in me, that v.d. Leyen got a fair chance overall. Seems like she lost her ways in fighting conservative opposition all her career. Anyway, Schwarzer is a nasty person, with some rather ignorant positions, so whatever. I just don't want to jump to conclusions on v.d. Leyen, without really reading up on shit, no more.
- 6y ago
Camillo 6y ago
> From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? That's how EU politics work. It's a storage area for unpopular politicians that did not do well at the national level, and a recycling center for unpopular legislation that was not approved in national legislatures. An example of the latter, also from Germany, is the copyright directive, which recycles proposals that German publishers could not get passed in their Bundestag.
flembat 6y ago
I am in the UK and while in the EU I thought we were part of the world's reasonable ethical block, but now from outside it is apparent how badly the EU bullies and intimidates other countries.
- matzab 6y ago
  A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories. Now that the EU tries to do the same as countries like the UK and the US do - not exporting - they are bullies? Right.
  - DrBazza 6y ago
    > A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories Yes, and those vaccines are, or were, only approved for use in the UK, the EU, only yesterday finally approved the AZ vaccine, 3 months after the UK. So who else are the pharma companies going to ship those vaccines to, when the shelf life is weeks or months? There is a global supply chain at work here, from the substances for the vaccines, to the equipment, and even skilled labour used to produce them. Very little of that, if any, is subject to export bans. The UK does not have an export ban on vaccines. The EU is free to sign contracts with any vaccine supplier in the UK. But history seems to be repeating itself again. The EU hasn't signed with Novavax, who have just passed trials. The UK signed 5 months ago, and it will be produced in NE England. [0] 0. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1390787/EU-vaccine-deal-novavax-stock-astrazeneca-contract-eu-novavax-vaccine-uk-covid https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1390787/EU-vaccine-deal...
    - libertine 6y ago
      Approval doesn't matter when AZ has to build stock to meet deadlines. Basically they weren't building stock to fulfill UK orders, from EU based production. It takes months to build stock, but they were flushing that stock to UK.
      - DrBazza 6y ago
tomgp 6y ago
Absolutely, the appeals to “fairness” have been particularly unedifying to hear whilst there are vast swathes of the world unable to access anything like the quantity of vaccine the EU has a hold on.
DrBazza 6y ago
The UK Government haven't yet made any specific statement about the vaccine export ban yet, have they? The only statement has been about the Northern Island border. > and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca Agreed. The only "people" that seem to be blaming the UK Gov are the media. > Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, The AZ-UK contract will say similar things to the EU contract, and AZ are upholding their part of the contract at the moment, delivering 'best reasonable efforts', and for all countries they've signed with. They're behind on deliveries for the UK as well. The UK signed commercial contracts with AZ, Pfizer and so on, as you would normally do. One of the problems is that the EU contract (and others, presumably) just isn't worded specifically enough. VdL and the EU are choosing to read 'best reasonable efforts' to mean different things [0], when in contract law it has a very specific and well understood meaning. As a result, VdL does not want to respect the queue of nations that have ordered before the EU that have also signed similar contracts to which AZ has similar, if not identical, contractual obligations. If this goes to the ECJ (?), AZ vs EU, it would be surprising, and worrying if the ECJ ruled in favour of the EU. Many companies would be reluctant to sign future contracts with the EU if they thought the EU would just ride roughshod over them. I recall reading that the supply of lipids (I'm probably wrong, I can't find the link) for the vaccine come from the UK, so if that's true, I really hope for everyone's sake, it doesn't turn into a pathetic tit-for-tat blocking of exports. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-astrazneca/astrazeneca-contract-at-heart-of-row-includes-uk-as-best-effort-base-for-output-to-eu-idUSKBN29Y1E2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...
dathinab 6y ago
> Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? Yes, I'm strongly irritated that she still has *any* job in politics after the failures she caused and the fact that a lot of it smelled quite a bit of a dangerous mix of incompetence and corruption.... But then I also have not looked too much into here (or politics in general) so I might be wrong.
odiroot 6y ago
> From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? From what my German friends told me, that was exactly the case. And her transition to Brussels was a move to save her and CDU's face.
patall 6y ago
It should be noted that von der Leyen got this job not because she was recommend by anyone in Germany. The actuall suggestion supposedly came from Macron. In the vote for her among governments. Germany was the only one to not vote for her, due to an intervention by the social democratic party that is a member of the current german government.
- foepys 6y ago
  France and Germany wanted both to head the European Central Bank and the European Commission, with both favoring the ECB. France got the ECB position in the end, most likely as part of a deal.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Nobody actually knows how she got the job. The person who runs the EU, the most powerful organisation in Europe, is appointed via a secret process decided in meetings with no public agenda and no published minutes. The closest I've ever seen to an explanation was one well known senior MEP's claim that "the next head of the EU must be a woman". Same thing as Kamala Harris. von der Leyen in turn then insisted that 50% of the Commissioners be women. Constitutionally, the head of the commission does not get to pick the commissioners, the countries do, but if there's one thing I've learned about the EU over the years it's that it's a big fan of law as long as the law is convenient for its own goals. Given it writes those laws that's usually pretty easy, but the moment the rules go against what it wants politically they are very suddenly ignored, often to a breathtaking scale. Observe how von der Leyen blatantly lied about the contents of the redacted contract to the whole world. She was only caught because the Commission suck at PDF. It's hard to imagine it's the first time she has boldly lied like that.
hef19898 6y ago
Your view of von der Leyen is pretty much correct. The problem is, so, the Spiegel has an axe to grind with her. Various reasons, she being from the CDU, being former Defense Minister, working with defense companies and the Big 5 consultancies. The defence company and defense ministry thing goes back the 60. Then defense minister Strauss, also head of the Bavarian CDU sister party CSU, illegally raided the Spiegel offices. And was the driving force behind EADS / Airbus as well. Ever since, the Spiegel is driving an agenda in that direction. Sometimes they loose themselves doing so. Their whole reporting of the Covid vaccine story is just another example where they totally miss the main issue.

Hunisgung 6y ago

I know people at the European Medecines Agency that were angry at Ursula von der Leyen in December because she was always making public announcements (about the beginning and speed of the vaccination campaign) with no regard for the reality of regulatory activities or manufacturing and logistics constraints.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I'm also pro-EU,remainer,etc. The problem is that the EU is the political graveyard, because countries send the most absurd people there. Not all of them,of course,but a lot. EU works when things are going slow and because of the sheer economical scale and power, everybody takes it serious when it comes to negotiations. But the EC isn't a bunch of experts on rapid situations. It's exactly the same when a French civil servant complained that they are being outbid when buying masks, because the state can't pay upfront, while the Americans ( individuals) could,so essentially a 60 million people country ended up competing against a few individuals with cash. Same with vaccines: while the EK were trying to come up with something, Israelis already were calling around the globe to make sure they get it first.

pelasaco 6y ago
thats true. At least in Germany, you are just sent to the EU Parlament if you re not performing well in the country level.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- petre 6y ago
  Except von der Leyen was sent in as head of the Comission, a position which is essentially the Prime Minister of the EU. The PM's or the head of the Comission's job is to get sh*t done, as opposed to bragging about it and passing the responsability and the blame onto others. Sorry to say but BJ is way better in this regard. He has delivered Brexit and the UK is in a much better position regarding vaccinations.
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    BJ and DT.
  - estaseuropano 6y ago
    Yes Legen is a bit like an EU prime minister, but she doesn't have the same prerogatives. The EU has the ultimate authority only on a narrow number of economic issues, but e.g. on borders and health it needs to get the agreement of 27 goverents to act. The EU is a compromise machine designed to manage the expectations and needs of 27 countries, not a presidential system where a Trump or Putin can sign executive decisions changing laws with the stroke of a pen. So Johnson or Trump as heads of the commission would likely manage to do better publicity-wise but I doubt they could get much faster results.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      That's incorrect. The EU is a presidential system where the head of the Commission (vDL) can and just did change laws at the stroke of a pen. She has far more power than Trump because Trump could be blocked by Congress and Congress can make its own laws to which Trump is subservient. The EU Commission is the ultimate source of all EU law, with the Parliament being not actually a parliament at all (it can't change the law!). An example of the EU changing the law on a whim was the regulations just published on Friday that imposed a border on Northern Ireland, the thing they just spent the last 4 years claiming would be terrible and provoke terrorist violence which is why the UK would have to basically 'lose' NI as territory. It could happen without Ireland or the UK even being consulted exactly because the EU is constitutionally a dictatorship of the Commission.

wrnr 6y ago

No way UK is to blame for this, just pure arrogance of narcissistic EU commission trowing a temper tantrum about how it can't possibly be even wrong after having grabbed all responsibility for delivering the vaccine because it was her moment to shine after the brexit, and then start pointing fingers at the first set back.

helij 6y ago
No one blamed UK. This blame thing is completely made up by UK media.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Not just UK media, German media as well. But maybe not to yhe same extent.
- xenoph0n 6y ago
  lol, the EU is publicly doing it and there are people in this thread doing it.

peteretep 6y ago

> Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program But let us be clear that it isn’t, and they are not.

jackTheMan 6y ago
Do you know how many doses UK is getting over the same period? Does UK also missing 60% of their contract or they are prioritized?
- wbillingsley 6y ago
  AZ set up a separate supply chain in each major jurisdiction. As I understand it, the EU interfered in its member countries' contracts, delayed them 3 months, delaying the EU supply chain from starting. Ridiculously, from what I can see, in the contract the EU specifically stated they could only supply a few early doses from the UK in 2020 (because after Jan 1 the UK is outside the EU and they are not permitted to use non-EU production) and have then been trying to make spurious claims they're supposed to divert UK doses nearly a month afterwards. Sorry to say it looks like EU Commission incompetence layered on some more EU Commission incompetence.
  - estaseuropano 6y ago
    The EU didn't interfere in any contracts. Some countries were moving ahead but the small ones were scared to be left out in the cold so pushed for it to be done by the EU instead of the big countries. Then once it was in the EU decision process some individual countries slower the agreement process with worries about price, ... Either way Brussels would get the blame - as too expensive, buying the wrong ones, not managing to agree quick enough, etc. But it's not as if someone in the commission just said and twiddled thumbs, they were negotiating, then convincing countries to agree, negotiating again, ... It's easy to point at 'the EU' but the Brussels institutions were asked to do it, rather than took this from someone. The countries were probably happy to have someone to blame later. What I would love to know is which country held things up in council - as the article says, some were doubting mRNA vaccines and others tried to go cheaper and that was the reason for the delay.

freeflight 6y ago

Leyen failing upwards is a pretty accurate description of her political career in Germany. She was never popular, one of her first "big ideas", as the head of the ministry for families, was to introduce DNS Internet-censorship against child pornography, which ultimately failed due to the public backlash. Like many other German career politicians, her doctors dissertation was found to be partly plagiarized. Her changes to the family allowances were across the board unpopular: High income couples profited the most from these changes, while middle and lower income classes lost out. There's even an active committee of inquiry still going on into her habit of hiring external, private, consultants to do the work for her at ministries. As a response to that she had the data on her mobile phone deleted, official files illegally redacted, and other data, that could be used as evidence, straight up deleted. For many Germans she's the definition of what's wrong with German politics because she didn't get where she is out of her own abilities, but rather as a consequence of her family having had that kind of influence in Germany for generations [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family

estaseuropano 6y ago
She is a product of the CDU - which promotes based on internal networks, not quality results. I would say she's not one of the worst politicians - everyone with that length in public life has a few scandals. I haven't forgiven her for her censorship laws, but the other 'scandals' seem rather be a matter of hubris (often confused with 'vision'). In other countries that's a normal expectation - new policies such as on childcare will have some birthing problems - but in germany politicians usually have waited for a solid plan before they announce big measures.
- monopoledance 6y ago
  I think Alice Schwarzer's words seeded some doubt in me, that v.d. Leyen got a fair chance overall. Seems like she lost her ways in fighting conservative opposition all her career. Anyway, Schwarzer is a nasty person, with some rather ignorant positions, so whatever. I just don't want to jump to conclusions on v.d. Leyen, without really reading up on shit, no more.
6y ago

Camillo 6y ago

> From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? That's how EU politics work. It's a storage area for unpopular politicians that did not do well at the national level, and a recycling center for unpopular legislation that was not approved in national legislatures. An example of the latter, also from Germany, is the copyright directive, which recycles proposals that German publishers could not get passed in their Bundestag.

flembat 6y ago

I am in the UK and while in the EU I thought we were part of the world's reasonable ethical block, but now from outside it is apparent how badly the EU bullies and intimidates other countries.

matzab 6y ago
A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories. Now that the EU tries to do the same as countries like the UK and the US do - not exporting - they are bullies? Right.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  > A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories Yes, and those vaccines are, or were, only approved for use in the UK, the EU, only yesterday finally approved the AZ vaccine, 3 months after the UK. So who else are the pharma companies going to ship those vaccines to, when the shelf life is weeks or months? There is a global supply chain at work here, from the substances for the vaccines, to the equipment, and even skilled labour used to produce them. Very little of that, if any, is subject to export bans. The UK does not have an export ban on vaccines. The EU is free to sign contracts with any vaccine supplier in the UK. But history seems to be repeating itself again. The EU hasn't signed with Novavax, who have just passed trials. The UK signed 5 months ago, and it will be produced in NE England. [0] 0. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1390787/EU-vaccine-deal-novavax-stock-astrazeneca-contract-eu-novavax-vaccine-uk-covid https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1390787/EU-vaccine-deal...
  - libertine 6y ago
    Approval doesn't matter when AZ has to build stock to meet deadlines. Basically they weren't building stock to fulfill UK orders, from EU based production. It takes months to build stock, but they were flushing that stock to UK.
    - DrBazza 6y ago

tomgp 6y ago

Absolutely, the appeals to “fairness” have been particularly unedifying to hear whilst there are vast swathes of the world unable to access anything like the quantity of vaccine the EU has a hold on.

DrBazza 6y ago

The UK Government haven't yet made any specific statement about the vaccine export ban yet, have they? The only statement has been about the Northern Island border. > and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca Agreed. The only "people" that seem to be blaming the UK Gov are the media. > Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, The AZ-UK contract will say similar things to the EU contract, and AZ are upholding their part of the contract at the moment, delivering 'best reasonable efforts', and for all countries they've signed with. They're behind on deliveries for the UK as well. The UK signed commercial contracts with AZ, Pfizer and so on, as you would normally do. One of the problems is that the EU contract (and others, presumably) just isn't worded specifically enough. VdL and the EU are choosing to read 'best reasonable efforts' to mean different things [0], when in contract law it has a very specific and well understood meaning. As a result, VdL does not want to respect the queue of nations that have ordered before the EU that have also signed similar contracts to which AZ has similar, if not identical, contractual obligations. If this goes to the ECJ (?), AZ vs EU, it would be surprising, and worrying if the ECJ ruled in favour of the EU. Many companies would be reluctant to sign future contracts with the EU if they thought the EU would just ride roughshod over them. I recall reading that the supply of lipids (I'm probably wrong, I can't find the link) for the vaccine come from the UK, so if that's true, I really hope for everyone's sake, it doesn't turn into a pathetic tit-for-tat blocking of exports. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-astrazneca/astrazeneca-contract-at-heart-of-row-includes-uk-as-best-effort-base-for-output-to-eu-idUSKBN29Y1E2 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...

dathinab 6y ago

> Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? Yes, I'm strongly irritated that she still has *any* job in politics after the failures she caused and the fact that a lot of it smelled quite a bit of a dangerous mix of incompetence and corruption.... But then I also have not looked too much into here (or politics in general) so I might be wrong.

odiroot 6y ago

> From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? From what my German friends told me, that was exactly the case. And her transition to Brussels was a move to save her and CDU's face.

patall 6y ago

It should be noted that von der Leyen got this job not because she was recommend by anyone in Germany. The actuall suggestion supposedly came from Macron. In the vote for her among governments. Germany was the only one to not vote for her, due to an intervention by the social democratic party that is a member of the current german government.

foepys 6y ago
France and Germany wanted both to head the European Central Bank and the European Commission, with both favoring the ECB. France got the ECB position in the end, most likely as part of a deal.
thu2111 6y ago
Nobody actually knows how she got the job. The person who runs the EU, the most powerful organisation in Europe, is appointed via a secret process decided in meetings with no public agenda and no published minutes. The closest I've ever seen to an explanation was one well known senior MEP's claim that "the next head of the EU must be a woman". Same thing as Kamala Harris. von der Leyen in turn then insisted that 50% of the Commissioners be women. Constitutionally, the head of the commission does not get to pick the commissioners, the countries do, but if there's one thing I've learned about the EU over the years it's that it's a big fan of law as long as the law is convenient for its own goals. Given it writes those laws that's usually pretty easy, but the moment the rules go against what it wants politically they are very suddenly ignored, often to a breathtaking scale. Observe how von der Leyen blatantly lied about the contents of the redacted contract to the whole world. She was only caught because the Commission suck at PDF. It's hard to imagine it's the first time she has boldly lied like that.

hef19898 6y ago

Your view of von der Leyen is pretty much correct. The problem is, so, the Spiegel has an axe to grind with her. Various reasons, she being from the CDU, being former Defense Minister, working with defense companies and the Big 5 consultancies. The defence company and defense ministry thing goes back the 60. Then defense minister Strauss, also head of the Bavarian CDU sister party CSU, illegally raided the Spiegel offices. And was the driving force behind EADS / Airbus as well. Ever since, the Spiegel is driving an agenda in that direction. Sometimes they loose themselves doing so. Their whole reporting of the Covid vaccine story is just another example where they totally miss the main issue.