EU Commission President Re-Elected In Spite of Losing a Transparency Case Before the European Court of Justice
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, seems untouchable. On 18th July she was re-elected by a comfortable majority of MEPs ( 401 yays versus 284 nays) to continue in her role, after leaving behind a legacy that included irregular relationships with Big Pharma, a maladministration finding by the European Ombudsman’s office, a criminal investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, assaults by her administration on free speech and informed consent, and Green policies that were crippling to farmers and citizens not as economically privileged as Europe’s political elites.
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In spite of her tainted legacy, the prospect of another five years of Ursula has been met with accolades from her sycophantic political supporters. Consider, for example, a post on X, in which Irish MEP Frances Fitzgerald describes von der Leyen in glowing terms as “a truly great leader who has set out an agenda that addresses all the issues relevant to the EU in a coherent and meaningful way.”
Considering von der Leyen’s actual track record, “truly great leader” are not the first words that come to mind. It is hard to fathom why she has not been forced to resign by now, and one would certainly not have expected her to be re-elected as Commission President for a second term. But it seems that her supporters in the European Parliament either do not recognise or do not care about the enormous harm she has done to citizens’ interests during her time as leader of the European Commission. The following are some of the hallmarks of her first five years in office:
She negotiated a massive vaccine contract with Pfizer via undisclosed WhatsApp messages with Pfizer’s CEO, and then refused to share the content of those text messages with the European Ombudsman. The Ombudsman’s report found the European Commission led by von der Leyen guilty of “maladministration.” As a result of this case, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office undertook a criminal investigation of von der Leyen’s actions, in regard to possible "interference in public functions, destruction of SMS, corruption and conflict of interest.”
During her presidency of the European Commission, von der Leyen chose to conceal significant parts of the vaccine contracts negotiated on behalf of EU citizens by redacting them. This decision to redact parts of the vaccine contracts was challenged by a group of MEPs in the European Court of Justice, and the court reversed the Commission’s decision, finding that the Commission (led by von der Leyen) “did not demonstrate that wider access to those clauses would actually undermine the commercial interests of those undertakings.”
Von der Leyen actively promoted a vaccine apartheid regime in Europe by creating a testing infrastructure through which EU member States could selectively require unvaccinated Europeans to test every time they entered their jurisdiction. This resulted in many citizens, including citizens at negligible risk from Covid, such as young and health travelers, submitting to a vaccine with an uncertain safety profile just to avoid the hassle and expense of testing every time they crossed a border. Those who either died or suffered serious harms to their health (e.g. from heart inflammation), because of caving in to this illicit pressure have EU governments, along with von der Leyen and the European Commission, to thank for their sufferings. To add insult to injury, the vaccines in question were never shown to block transmission of Covid-19, and evidence suggests they were very ineffective at preventing transmission.
She was one of the architects of the Digital Services Act, which creates mechanisms through which the European Commission can hit social media companies with multi-billion dollar fines for failing to comply with vague “due diligence” obligations to combat hate speech, “disinformation” and non-”civic” discourse. These vaguely defined powers could easily be leveraged by the Commission to pressure social media companies into censoring speech that does not conform to its own ideological and political preferences. EU citizens can thank Ursula von der Leyen and her Commission for making the European digital public sphere more vulnerable to government-sponsored censorship than ever before.
President von der Leyen was responsible for pushing through deeply unpopular climate and environmental policies that ultimately saw Dutch farmers forced into selling their land to the government, put many European farmers’ livelihood in jeopardy, and put even more pressure on rising energy prices across Europe, hitting poor and working-class citizens much harder than the sorts of citizens who work in the European Parliament or Commission. The green agenda has causes so much of an uproar in Europe - including massive tractor convoys across the continent - that von der Leyen had to back away from some of its more extreme elements, such as drastic reductions in the use of pesticides, in order to prevent an electoral backlash.
Von der Leyen’s record speaks for itself. She deserved to be removed from office for her highly irregular and opaque handling of the vaccine contracts, for throwing the right to informed consent out the window for the sake of a vaccine that didn’t even prevent transmission, for bloating the Commission’s power over the digital public sphere at the expense of citizens’ right to freedom of expression, and for dramatically undermining people’s livelihood in the farming sector and beyond with draconian climate policies. Instead, she got re-elected by a comfortable majority and was met with adulation by MEPs in parliament. That alone speaks volumes about the political system that is the European Union.
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The EU has two zones: Brussels and the EU’s citizens.