A HOMAGE TO URSULA VON DER LEYEN
2022 OCTOBER ISSUE
Written by Andrew Sia
Image Illustrated by Elita Lam
Ursula von der Leyen was born October 8, 1958 in Brussels and that made her 64 years old this year. Her father, Ernest Albrecht worked for the organization that would eventually become the European Union. She spent her childhood in Brussels and attended the school there, and spent her free time practicing horsemanship. She is the third child in the family of seven children, and later she has her own family with seven children as well.
In 1971, the family moved back to Germany, by then it was a split country, and her father was later elected to state parliament as a politician for the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, also known as the CDU party.
Ursula von der Leyen was moving between England, German and French, was very much what the postwar Europeans were moving around the countries. But she could recall the shuddered experience when she was to cross from West Germany into East Germany and she could feel the lawlessness. As the children of the politicians, they would face the threat of being kidnapped. She went to study at the London School of Economics and enjoyed the cosmopolitan London’s freedom.
Eventually she returned to Germany and there she met her future husband, physician Heiko von der Leyen, in the University of Göttingen choir. They married in 1986 and soon after she graduated from Hannover Medical School and started working as a gynecologist.
In 1992, the couple moved to California with their three children where Heiko was offered a role on Stanford University’s faculty. She quitted working while she was there, but found the school was ready to give them childcare unlike the situation back in Germany.
After she returned to Germany in 2006, she involved in the local politics for the CDU. It was in the year before Angela Merkel appointed her as the Federal Minister for Family Affair, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. She became the protégé of Angela Merkel, and was the rising star and proved to be an unexpectedly radical force for the center-right party.
She introduced a paid-parental-leave scheme that offered two additional months for fathers who took leave, and increased the number of state-funded day-care centers for children under the age of 3. It went well when her career took off, her husband assumed much of the childcare responsibilities. It went well with her seven children in the family.
In 2013, she was appointed as Germany’s first female Defense Minister, which was considered as the hardest job in Berlin. It was also a hardest position even for the most stereo-typed male. She was touted as Germany’s next leader, and in fact in her 2015 biography, she was named as the Chancellor in Reserve. But in 2019, tainted by a series of scandals, her position became insecure.
It was French President Emmanuel Macron who saved her career by putting her name forward when negotiations for a new President of the European Commission were blocked. Ursula von der Leyen emerged as a surprise winner. And at home she was such a divisive figure, but it was that Germany as a European Union member who could abstain from the vote to nominate her.
She became the first female President of the European Commission. She also became the victim of the workplace sexism, but she was found able to keep her coolness. To lead the 27 E.U. member states with 477 million people, to agree on E.U. policy and budgets was not an easy task, not to mention to make them to agree on legislation as well. She took the office in December 2019 with her hands tied up with digital and green policies and not to forget the gender equality.
In her 102 days into her term, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 as a pandemic in March 2020. European Union was at the verge of falling apart as disagreements over border closures and tense negotiations on an economic rescue package. Then the Covid-19 vaccine rollout which was criticized for being too slow and ineffective.
But the invasion of Russia into Ukraine on February 24, 2022 took everyone by surprise. Within a week of invasion, Brussels had already approved three packages of sanctions against Russia, targeting from Russian banks to Kremlin-controlled media. For the first time ever, the E.U. said that it would send weapons to Ukraine. This has also changed after decades of pacifism in Europe and for a long time, finally Finland and Sweden have expressed their desire to abandoning their long-standing neutrality and apply for NATO membership.
In April, Ursula von der Leyen was the first Western leader to visit Ukraine and she addressed Volodymyr Zelensky as “dear Volodymyr”, and handed him the application to join the European Union. In May, she addressed in Strasbourg for Russia’s accountability for being the war criminal, and insisted that President Vladimir Putin should pay the price for his brutality. She even went further to denounce Putin and declared the trust has been totally broken.
We have to know that the European Inion was born out of the war wreckage of World War Two, but years of deep divisions in Brussels have now been adhered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A newfound unity revitalized European order that will motivate a new idealism and can even lead the bloc at a more significant direction more than any time since the fall of Berlin Wall. This democracy has been earned in a very hard way and hopefully that it can be imminent in this growing European Union. The union is under the test everyday as it has faced the biggest movement of people on the continent since the Second World War—6.9 million, mostly in women and children who have fled Ukraine.
Sanctions have been proved as a two-edged sword, energy costs and food prices are soaring, also the inflation in the euro area is hitting its all-time high since the currency was created in 1999.
But in these days the member states are still spending $1 billion a day on Russian oil and gas which are used by Putin to finance his war machine against Ukraine. The first thing to do now is to cut back their appetite from Russia and switchover to other reliable and friendly sources.
Ursula von der Leyen has to come back to the priorities she set at the start of her term—digitization, economic resilience, and climate action—all are valid today. The European Green Deal, the strategy she launched and led all the 27-states to have committed in 2020 to make the European Union a net-zero emitter by 2050. She is taking now the E.U. to completely driven away from Russian fossil fuels, and look for other substitutes, not only from the supply but also toward the renewables.
Ursula von der Leyen, the most powerful woman in Europe is taking all these challenges to her heart, she admitted that she is sometimes exhausted with all the crisis in her hands. Instead of traveling back and forth to her family in Germany, she is sleeping in a 270 square-feet -room right by her desk. She has been dedicating herself to this job and she has won a lot of praises and encouragements from the fellow European leaders.