As Ursula von der Leyen begins her second term as President of the European Commission, she does so as a colossus, enjoying sweeping authority over the European Union and its 450 million inhabitants. The Empress rules a bloc that’s undemocratic by design, and which puts immense authority in the hands of its rulers. And as seems clear, she intends to extend her technocratic revolution, transforming the EU from a collection of member-states into a single state.
With Macron floundering, and Scholz despised, von der Leyen’s continued tenure breaks with a global pattern of incumbency failure. Unlike mere politicians, though, von der Leyen doesn’t need to worry about what the voters think. To be sure, the President of the EU Commission must secure the support of the EU Parliament, but only after having been nominated by the government of each member state. In theory, that should reflect the outcome of European elections. In practice, however, the EU Parliament is a castrated legislature, constitutionally incapable of initiating law.
Von der Leyen is less the executive of an open democracy and more the chief officer of a Soviet politburo. That’s clear, certainly, if you glance at the titles of the President’s commissars. From the executive vice president for clean, just and competition transition, to the executive vice president for cohesion and reforms, her underlings preside over departments that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Seventies Moscow. And during her first term in office, from 2019 to 2024, she relentlessly consolidated authority, slowly tilting the EU’s balance of power towards supranational institutions like the Commission — and away from the Council of Ministers representing member states.
This state-building project looks set to ramp up during her second term; as she makes clear in her political guidelines for the next commission, her vision is infused with existential discourse, insisting that Europe has no future unless it continues to grind its way towards unity. With von der Leyen’s determination to pursue the proxy war in Ukraine at the expense of European economic wellbeing, and her reliance on Baltic politicians such as Kaja Kallas as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, she seems to be following the historic pattern of state-making through crisis.
Yet if Ursula is a modern Charlemagne in her vanity and ambition, the fact that her efforts are so remote from the popular will means they’ll inevitably founder. Though centralisation at the top will doubtless enhance her personal sway, that means little without bolstering the wider EU system. In fact, concentrating power in this non-sovereign model is likely to make it even more lopsided, with a top-heavy superstructure perched over a continent seething with popular discontent. No matter how many Russophobes von der Leyen stuffs into her bureaucracy, after all, the Ukraine war will ultimately be decided not in Brussels but Washington, when Donald Trump shortly re-enters the White House in January.
Thus the paradox of von der Leyen’s second term is that as the power of the EU centre grows, Europe itself becomes weaker. Nothing that von der Leyen does seems likely to reverse this decline. In fact, her plan to completely end the flow of Russian gas into Europe, in favour of expensive liquified natural gas from the US, speaks to her congenital inability to act in her continent’s best interests. That, in turn, reflects the fact that the EU is not a nation-state, and by design can’t have a national self-interest. While von der Leyen has therefore been promising to slash the regulation that supposedly stifles European business — plenty of which were brought in under her last term — the fact is that industry from Rioja to the Ruhr will continue to suffer without cheap energy.
How will this historic decline be disguised? This takes us to the second of von der Leyen’s transformations: appointing Raffaele Fitto, a minister from the Brothers of Italy party, as her executive vice president for cohesion and reforms. In so doing, von der Leyen has broken the liberal cordon sanitaire whereby the continent’s technocratic establishment sought to contain the electoral insurgencies of EU populists. Fitto’s new job has cost von der Leyen the support of certain natural allies, notably the Socialists and Democrats grouping in the EU Parliament. Yet Empress Ursula is cunning enough to realise that by appearing to be responsive to public demands, and drawing in electorally successful populists, she can easily recoup any losses sustained among squabbling centrists.
The nominal basis for this new political friendship is, of course, a shared commitment to pursuing the proxy war in Eastern Europe. Yet the basis for the Fitto alliance runs deeper than Ukraine. Rather, the alliance indicates that the continent’s hard-Right national populists are being carefully, and willingly, drawn into the court of the imperial centre. The reason? To help re-legitimise von der Leyen’s faltering clique of technocrats.
Certainly, Fitto’s appointment puts paid to the idea that populists defend national sovereignty against incursions from Brussels. It also suggests that the radicals are more than happy to collaborate with the technocrats to disguise the latter’s lack of real legitimacy. In many ways, then, Fitto represents a natural alliance, proving the point that both technocrats and populists ultimately despise national representative institutions. The technocrats dislike democracy because interest groups get in the way of the unfettered rule of experts. Populists, for their part, dislike it because, by their nature, institutionalised interests gnaw away at the demagogic charisma they so rely on.
In this way, then, both technocrats and populists are creatures from the void where national democracy should be. The fact that people such as Fitto have rushed to hide von der Leyen’s nakedness suggests that the age of European decline will be dominated by techno-populism, with both camps cooperating to accommodate each other’s weakness — even as they jointly rule over a deindustrialising continent. At any rate, that leaves space for Europe’s remaining democrats: what happens when voters realise the populists have betrayed them?
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/