Ursula von der Leyen should get a second five-year term at the head of the European Commission despite the somewhat phoney drama around her confirmation vote in the European parliament on Thursday.
To be sure, the 65-year-old centre-right former German defence minister cannot be certain of winning the absolute majority of 361 votes required to retain her job. Several members of the informal pro-European parliamentary coalition of the conservative European People’s party (EPP), the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the liberal centrist Renew Europe (RE) campaigned against her or have said they will not vote for her.
That means she will need extra votes, probably from a much diminished Greens group, possibly also from Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, although not from her national conservative European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group as a whole. She will not cut formal deals with either, but she will have to offer sufficient assurances on their key concerns – implementing climate-protection laws for the Greens and a harder line on migration for Meloni – to ensure their support.
The uncertainty is mostly due to national politics. French conservatives and socialists see her as too close to their domestic nemesis, centrist president Emmanuel Macron. Germany’s FDP liberals oppose her mostly because she is a member of their conservative Christian Democratic (CDU) opponents. Ireland’s Fine Gael MEPs say they won’t back her due to her full-throated support for Israel in its war on the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza in response to its 7 October massacre of Israelis.
All politics is local, as former US House of Representatives speaker Tip O’Neill famously said. But EU........