There is a photograph from the spring of 2022 that captures something important about Ursula von der Leyen.

She is standing in Kyiv, on the steps of the Mariinsky Palace, beside Volodymyr Zelensky. She is wearing a flak jacket over a pale blazer. The image was staged, as such images always are — but it also reflected something genuine. The President of the European Commission, the head of an institution built to negotiate agricultural subsidies and trade standards, had flown into a war zone to signal that Europe's response to Russia's invasion would not be managed at a cautious bureaucratic distance.

It was a characteristic move: institutional authority deployed with deliberate personal drama.

Whether you find this reassuring or unsettling probably depends on your view of the European Commission itself.

Ursula von der Leyen was born in 1958 in Brussels — a biographical detail that her supporters find symbolic and her critics find too convenient. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was a senior European Commission official before becoming Minister-President of Lower Saxony. She grew up between Germany and Belgium, between the world of German conservative politics and the European institutional milieu that would eventually define her career.

She studied economics in Göttingen before switching to medicine at Hanover Medical School, where she completed her degree in 1987. For a time she practised as a physician. Then came marriage, seven children, and an eventual return to politics — first to Lower Saxony, then to Berlin.

Her national political career unfolded under Angela Merkel. She served as Federal Minister for Family Affairs, then as Minister for Labour and Social Affairs, and finally — controversially — as Germany's first female Minister of Defence. It was in that last role that she accumulated both experience and enemies. Her tenure at the Bundeswehr was turbulent. Reports of management problems, expensive consultants, and a PhD plagiarism investigation involving her doctoral thesis generated sustained criticism. By 2019, when her name first circulated seriously as a candidate for the Commission presidency, many in Berlin were not entirely sorry to see her go.

The manner of her arrival at the head of the European Commission is itself instructive about how European politics actually works.

The 2019 European Parliament elections had produced an inconclusive result. The established process — nominating the lead candidate of the winning parliamentary group, the so-called Spitzenkandidat system — collapsed when no candidate could assemble a majority. After days of backroom negotiations between European leaders, von der Leyen's name emerged not from a public democratic process but from a private summit of government heads.

She had not been a candidate. She had not campaigned across Europe. She was chosen because she was acceptable to enough governments simultaneously — German, therefore credible; a woman, therefore symbolically useful; not too associated with any particular faction, therefore manageable.

The European Parliament confirmed her by a margin of nine votes.

It was a reminder of something the European Commission's critics have always argued: that its leadership ultimately flows from intergovernmental negotiation, not from citizens' ballots.

Von der Leyen was aware of this fragile mandate. She responded by moving quickly.

Within weeks of taking office in December 2019, she announced the European Green Deal.

The ambition was striking. Europe would become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Emissions targets were tightened. A comprehensive legislative programme — dozens of regulations touching energy, transport, agriculture, buildings, and industrial production — was set in motion.

Critics noted that the timelines were long, the details vague, and the political coalitions required to pass each piece of legislation uncertain. All of this was true. But the announcement served a purpose beyond its specific content. It established the Commission under von der Leyen as a political actor with a strategic agenda, not merely an administrative body implementing member state decisions.

This reframing mattered.

The Commission's formal powers are defined and limited. It proposes legislation; it does not pass it. Yet the power to set the agenda, to define what Europe is discussing, is itself a form of authority. Von der Leyen understood this instinctively. The Green Deal was as much a political statement as a regulatory programme.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a transformation already underway.

Europe's initial response in early 2020 was, by most assessments, fragmented. National governments closed borders, competed for medical supplies, and largely ignored each other. The Commission struggled to assert relevance.

Then came the vaccine procurement debacle. The EU's centralized vaccine purchasing programme, championed by von der Leyen, initially fell badly behind the United Kingdom and the United States in securing and distributing doses. The Commission was slow to approve contracts, cautious about liability clauses, and — most damagingly — the process lacked transparency. When details of her personal phone calls with the CEO of Pfizer became a controversy, and her text messages were sought by the European Parliament under freedom of information requests, the episode exposed the gap between the Commission's institutional ambition and its accountability mechanisms.

The criticism stung. But it did not fundamentally derail the broader project.

In the summer of 2020, European governments agreed to the Next Generation EU recovery fund — a programme of 750 billion euros financed through joint borrowing by the European institutions. It was, by any measure, a significant step. For the first time, the European Commission issued common debt on a substantial scale on behalf of member states.

The decision was controversial, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, where opposition to fiscal risk-sharing with southern Europe has deep political roots. It passed anyway.

Whether this represents a durable shift in European fiscal architecture or a one-time emergency measure remains genuinely contested. Von der Leyen positioned it as a precedent. Others insist it was an exception.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced what von der Leyen's supporters would describe as her defining moment.

The response was faster and more unified than most observers expected. European sanctions against Russia were assembled in successive packages. Weapons deliveries to Ukraine, coordinated partly through EU mechanisms, began within weeks. Energy policy was restructured at speed, reducing European dependence on Russian gas from roughly 40 percent of imports to near zero within two years.

Von der Leyen was visibly central to all of this. She flew to Kyiv repeatedly. She appeared alongside Zelensky at international summits. She announced sanctions packages at press conferences timed for maximum impact. The Commission, under her leadership, had become something that would have been difficult to predict five years earlier: a foreign policy actor.

Not an autonomous one — member states retained control over defence and diplomacy — but a coordinating force capable of assembling and sustaining a collective European response.

The limits of this role became visible too. Hungary repeatedly complicated sanctions packages and blocked aid disbursements to Ukraine. Divisions over how quickly to move toward Ukrainian EU membership surfaced repeatedly. The consensus that von der Leyen assembled was real but fragile.

In 2024, von der Leyen was nominated for a second term as Commission President.

The political context had shifted. The European Parliament elections in June 2024 produced significant gains for nationalist and right-wing parties. The centrist majority that had sustained her first term narrowed. Von der Leyen's own party, the European People's Party, remained the largest group — but the arithmetic required more complicated coalition management.

Her second-term agenda reflected the changed political environment. The Green Deal's legislative ambitions were scaled back under pressure from agricultural and industrial lobbies. Competitiveness — specifically, closing Europe's gap with the United States and China in technology and industrial capacity — moved to the centre of the agenda. A major report by Mario Draghi, commissioned by von der Leyen herself, argued that Europe needed to invest an additional 800 billion euros annually simply to maintain its relative position in the global economy.

The numbers were stark. Whether European governments could agree on how to find them remained, as of early 2026, the central open question of her presidency.

In September 2024, Mario Draghi — former President of the European Central Bank and former Italian Prime Minister — delivered a report to the European Commission that was remarkable less for its conclusions than for its candour.

Europe, the report argued, was falling behind. Not collapsing, not failing — but slowly losing ground relative to the United States and China in the industries that will define the next two decades: artificial intelligence, clean technology, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors. The gap in research investment, in venture capital, in the ability to scale new companies from startup to global competitor, was widening.

The required response, Draghi calculated, would cost roughly 800 billion euros per year in additional investment. The number was chosen partly for its shock value. It worked.

Von der Leyen had commissioned the report and received it publicly at a ceremony designed to amplify its impact. Whether this reflected genuine alarm, political positioning, or both is difficult to say from the outside. What is clear is that the competitiveness agenda — reducing regulation, accelerating industrial policy, creating European capital markets deep enough to fund large-scale technological investment — became the defining framing of her second term.

The tension with the Green Deal's regulatory ambitions was immediate and unresolved. Climate targets and industrial competitiveness can be pursued simultaneously, but they create friction. Businesses lobbying against Green Deal regulations found a more receptive Commission in 2024 and 2025 than they had encountered four years earlier. Environmental groups noticed.

Von der Leyen's second term is, in this sense, a negotiation between two versions of European ambition: the regulatory Europe that sets global standards, and the industrial Europe that wants to compete on the same terms as its rivals.

A senior European diplomat, speaking privately, once described working with von der Leyen this way: 'She listens carefully, agrees with everything you say, and then does exactly what she had already decided to do.'

Whether this is a criticism or a compliment depends on context. Political leadership in a consensus-based system requires the appearance of consultation. The substance of decisions often emerges from a smaller circle and earlier than the formal process suggests.

What is clear is that von der Leyen has remade the European Commission's self-image.

The institution she inherited in 2019 was widely seen as an administrative body of considerable technical competence and limited political ambition. The one she leads in 2026 claims a role in shaping Europe's strategic direction — on climate, on security, on industrial policy, on the continent's relationship with the United States and China.

Whether this expansion of the Commission's political role is sustainable depends on member states' willingness to accept it. German chancellors, French presidents, and the governments of smaller member states have all, at different moments, pushed back against Commission overreach.

The European project has always advanced through this tension — between supranational ambition and national sovereignty, between institutional momentum and political constraint.

Ursula von der Leyen did not resolve that tension. She inhabited it more aggressively than most of her predecessors.

Europe's Power Figures is a monthly supplement to EuroTasteDaily, profiling the individuals who shape the continent's direction.

Next month: Pedro Sánchez — coalition politics, Catalan deals, and the paradox of governing a fragmented Spain.