PROFILE
The Aristocratic Ineptitude of Ursula Von Der
Leyen
How the EU president’s family connections explain her
rise to power—and failures using it during the pandemic.
By Peter
Kuras
APRIL 30,
2021, 5:35 AM
Where does
the buck stop in the EU? There’s been plenty of finger pointing as Europeans try
to figure out why their own vaccination efforts lag so far behind much of the
rest of the world. In many ways, the EU’s failure to produce an adequate supply
of its vaccine is the kind of cataclysmic social failure that seems to indict
entire regimes, not simply individual actors. No one is powerful enough to
produce such a multifaceted failure on their own.
Yet much of
the blame and anger has deservedly settled on European Commission President
Ursula von der Leyen. To oust her, as former European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker recently demanded, would be understandable given her blind
trust in free market forces to administer Europe’s vaccination efforts and
flailing attempts to make up for the resulting shortages.
But it
would be a mistake to blame von der Leyen without understanding the broader
failures that installed a person with a middling record in such a powerful
position in the first place. The ultimate problem with von der Leyen is not
that she bungled Europe’s vaccine rollout. It’s that she obtained her position
through a kind of incestuous, image-obsessed politics that made bungling an
inevitability.
Germans
might have a reputation for being cold and rational, but mothers play a
surprisingly large role in the political culture. For the Nazis, motherhood was
the most a woman could hope to accomplish. They made Mother’s Day a national
holiday in Germany and rewarded exemplary mothers with the Mutterkreuz or
“Mother’s Cross.” Mothers were perhaps even more essential to the post-war era,
however, when Germany was largely rebuilt by the so-called Trümmerfrauen, women
who took their names from the piles of rubble they helped clear and repurpose
while their husbands and fathers awaited release from prisoner-of-war camps. In
this context, it can hardly be surprising that powerful women are almost
inevitably maternal in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel became a
notable exception but only because she overcame the burden—in the form of
public criticism and media skepticism—associated with her childlessness.
Merkel’s
understanding of this dynamic would be one way of explaining the trust she
placed in an unproven regional politician at the beginning of her
chancellorship. Von der Leyen certainly seemed the perfect embodiment of
motherhood: With seven children of her own, she had already climbed the lower
ranks of Germany’s political establishment while promoting an image of herself
as a kind of supermom, who packed lunchboxes and tended to boo-boos while
juggling affairs of state.
Today, the
image of the power-mom with a big job and a bigger brood has become commonplace
in global politics, especially on the right. Frauke Petry, former leader of
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, has been especially
conspicuous in using her six children to her political advantage, in ways
reminiscent of former U.S. Gov. Sarah Palin, whose five children and “grizzly
mama” moniker were constantly exploited for political gain when she shared a
ticket with then-U.S. Sen. John McCain in 2008.
Von der
Leyen, with fewer populist impulses than Petry or Palin, has found ways of
investing Germany’s politics of motherhood with new substance. Placed by Merkel
atop both the ministry for family affairs and the ministry for labor in
successive governments, von der Leyen was responsible for introducing new
directives intended to bring mothers back into the workforce. Among them were
the introduction of Elterngeld, a program that replaces a substantial portion
of the salaries of parents who take leave from their jobs to care for their
children, and a program that expands public day care programs so they are available
to children as young as 12 months old. Both programs have now become so
thoroughly a part of public life in Germany that it can be difficult to imagine
just how controversial they were when first introduced, but they each came
under fire, especially from conservatives who saw them as an affront to
traditional family structures and unnecessarily invasive to private life.
Von der
Leyen, with her seven children and strong ties within the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU), was the perfect person to push through these reforms. She served
as an endless example for women’s ability to do it all. But another key factor
often gets overlooked: her lineage. It should be no surprise that von der Leyen
has been adept at exploiting images of youth and family for political ends. She
learned at the hands of masters.
Von der
Leyen was herself one of seven children, though her sister Benita-Eva died
tragically in childhood. She was born in Brussels in 1958 to Ernst Albrecht and
Heidi Adele Stromeyer. It was a charmed, if difficult, moment in German
history. The Wirtschaftswunder made the country Europe’s economic engine, and
it was coupled with a newfound confidence in Germany’s central economic and
defensive role in the new world order. There were few more enthusiastic
beneficiaries of the rapidly shifting political landscape than the Albrecht
family. Albrecht was one of the European Union’s first civil servants. He was
just 37 years old when he was appointed to the highest civil-service office in
the Directorate-General for Competition, where he oversaw the nascent European Union’s
antitrust operations.
Albrecht
grew dissatisfied with life in Brussels, however, and returned to his ancestral
home in Hanover, Germany. He was soon elected to the position of minister
president (or governor, in U.S. diction) of Lower Saxony, an office he held
between 1976 and 1990. Albrecht had a reputation as a politician whose
influence exceeded his office, and he was a perennial pick for the CDU’s next
chancellor. Though he never held any higher office, he and his family were
constantly in the limelight. It can hardly be a surprise. The children were
blond, beautiful, and talented, and Stromeyer seemed as cool and sovereign in
front of the camera as her husband.
Indeed, in
some very real ways, Germany still thinks of von der Leyen as Albrecht’s little
girl. While the childless Merkel gained the nickname “mutti,” or mommy, von der
Leyen still carries the nickname given to her by her father: “Röschen” or
“Little Rosie.” To reduce von der Leyen to her father’s daughter, as one does
when one calls her “Röschen,” is to overlook the fact that she has far exceeded
his political accomplishments. It’s a terrible nickname. A better nickname
might have been, “die hübsche.” It means “the pretty one” in everyday parlance,
so it might hardly seem an improvement in terms of misogyny. But it also has
another history. In Hanover, the “hübsche Familien” were quasi-noble families
who had special access to the court. The Albrecht family have held this
status—and key positions in German politics—for more than 500 years.
Contemporary
Germany doesn’t seem like a place where aristocratic titles and family lineages
hold much sway—publicly, Germans are deeply committed to democratic culture and
have minimal interest in the kinds of aristocratic trappings that still seem to
capture British hearts. Yet the aristocracy have managed to maintain far more
of both its economic and political privileges than is commonly recognized.
Indeed, the Social Democratic Party’s youth committee proposed legislation to
ban the adoption of noble titles as parts of last names; had they succeeded,
the president of the European Commission would have had to drop the noble title
she took when she married her husband, and she would now simply be called
Ursula Leyen. The demand was not empty. Many nobles still move in an elite
world, where titles can have a real effect on a person’s chances of career
success and where bloodlines still trump accomplishments as a measure of a
person’s worth.
Although it
would be foolhardy to think von der Leyen could have achieved everything she
has without political talents of her own, it’s also important to recognize she
has always been granted a kind of privilege that far surpasses the parochial
advantages accorded to average Germans. Von der Leyen’s family tree traces a
legacy of power and brutality, incorporating not only some of Germany’s most
significant Nazis but also some of Britain’s largest slave traders and, through
marriage, some of the United States’ largest slave owners. Von der Leyen is
descended directly from James Ladson, who owned more than 200 slaves when the
Civil War broke out.
It might
seem petty to condemn someone for their ancestry: The sins of the father, after
all, shall not be visited on the son—or, in this case, the daughter. But von
der Leyen herself has invoked these forefathers unapologetically, if
unthinkingly. When von der Leyen was in college and a group of radical,
left-wing terrorists called the Red Army Faction (RAF) went on a violent crime
spree, Albrecht, concerned his family would become a target of the RAF,
implored his beloved Röschen to study abroad. She enrolled at the London School
of Economics under the name Rose Ladson. Few people at the time were as
conscious of the lingering legacies of slavery as we have now become, but her
choice to assume the name of her slave-holding ancestors was an indication
nevertheless about her comfort with unchallenged and inherited privilege.
Even if von
der Leyen was a little more reflective about her ancestry, it would be
necessary to point out the ruling classes that emerged centuries ago continue,
at least in some cases, to hold undue influence on European politics. The kinds
of family trees that seem to include a shameful number of moral transgressions
are still revered by much of the continent’s ruling elite. It’s no accident that
French President Emmanuel Macron is commonly cited as having first suggested
von der Leyen for the leadership position, citing her perfect French—the French
she learned as a child when her father was in Brussels—as evidence of her
cosmopolitan nature. But there are any number of Europeans who speak excellent
French, and Macron complimented more than her pronunciation. At a press
conference, Macron praised her “profoundly European culture” before going on to
say “she has the DNA of the European community,” referring explicitly to her
father’s important role in Europe’s bureaucratic apparatus more than 40 years
earlier.
However,
it’s not only that von der Leyen’s name and connections have provided her with
a kind of aristocratic sheen. Family was always crucial to her political
trajectory. She catapulted through the ranks of local government in Lower
Saxony largely because she could call her father’s former allies into line in
the service of Christian Wulff, the minister president of Lower Saxony when von
der Leyen began her career there in 2003 at the age of 45. These connections,
and the milieu in which they were established, were the precondition of von der
Leyen’s political maternity. Indeed, the power of her connections is evident in
the story of how she gained her first regional seat.
Her own
home in the tiny Hanover suburb of Ilten was represented by regional CDU
chairperson Jürgen Gansäuer, so she decided to try her political hand in her
hometown of Burgdorf, even though that seat had been held for almost 15 years
by a CDU politician named Lutz von der Heide. The first primary, which she won
by a single vote, was thrown out on a technicality. Her father jumped into
action, and with Wilfried Hasselmann, then the honorary chair of the CDU in
Hanover, he went on a charm offensive. Meanwhile, the regional edition of the
powerful tabloid Bild started a smear campaign against von der Heide. Though
von der Heide had held the seat for more than a decade and was, by all
accounts, a skilled politician, she won with two-thirds of the votes.
This
combination of high political connections and low-brow slander is typical of
the family’s political style. Albrecht, with his photogenic family and
conservative values, had always been a favorite of the paper. Von der Leyen
surpassed him. For years, she wrote a column for the tabloid, which is easily
the most powerful in Germany. Her political convictions played a secondary
role. Indeed, many of the columns seem as though they might be ad copy for some
strange German cousin of J.Crew—the images of the family relaxing, riding, and
playing music together could hardly have been more carefully staged had the
family been modeling the latest in seersucker and chambray rather than
advocating for their particular brand of politics.
It’s
unsurprising that von der Leyen’s successes at the labor and family ministries
served to make her, for a time, Merkel’s natural successor as leader of the
CDU. The policies—despite some complaints about inequities across social
classes—were widely popular on the left while von der Leyen herself was widely
popular among German centrists. Her next job, as Germany’s defense minister,
would have been a natural stepping stone to the top job; Helmut Schmidt and
Gerhard Schröder had already gone from that position to the German
chancellorship in prior decades. When von der Leyen entered office in 2013,
Merkel had already been chancellor for eight years, and it seemed likely that
von der Leyen, after a tenure leading the German military, would replace her.
But von der
Leyen’s career floundered at the defense ministry in ways that foreshadowed her
failures in Brussels—and were entirely in keeping with her earlier successes.
The ministries of family and labor are important sites of policy development,
and they allowed von der Leyen to flaunt her considerable skill at
redistributing tax money in ways that represented the needs of German families.
But the managerial challenges of the defense ministry are of an entirely
different order. It wasn’t just that von der Leyen had never previously shown
an interest in security policy. At her earlier posts, von der Leyen primarily
led small teams of loyal deputies; at defense, she suddenly was the boss of
hundreds of thousands of people and responsible for an annual budget of more
than $48 billion. In her many earlier successes, she never demonstrated a
particular skill at overseeing the sort of massive global logistic problems the
military confronts every day as a matter of course—or even at navigating the
internal dynamics of complex organizations like the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed
forces.
Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, one of her first reforms at the defense ministry involved the creation
of army day care centers (or “Kitas”). Here, again, the kinds of care work von
der Leyen supported were critically important, both societally and militarily.
Germany abandoned mandatory military service just a few years before von der
Leyen began to serve as defense secretary, and the army was in the midst of
adjusting to its new, fully professional status. The Kitas was only one of
several measures von der Leyen introduced to make the army more family
friendly. She also attempted to tie soldiers’ leaves to school breaks, allow
soldiers to work part time while still progressing in their careers, and limit
the number of relocations soldiers with families had to endure. One shouldn’t
underestimate the importance of these measures; not only were they crucial to
maintaining a standing army, but there is also reason to believe a more
family-friendly military is less susceptible to right-wing extremism than one
that relies on a more traditional model of the family.
But if von
der Leyen’s powerful connections, aristocratic comportment, and media savvy
were enough to carry her through stints leading Germany’s ministries of family
and labor, they failed her in her role as the head of Germany’s military. Can
it be any surprise, really, that a person who had neither any previous
experience in defense policy or strategy nor substantial experience managing large
organizations in the private or public sectors should fail in such a complex
and varied role?
Von der
Leyen held the post as defense minister from 2013 to 2019, a remarkable run
considering her inexperience. But when things came crashing down, they came
crashing down quickly—and exposed a slew of mismanagement, incompetence, and
potential corruption. The scandal is usually called the “consultant affair” due
to the untold hundreds of millions of dollars von der Leyen and her chief
deputy Katrin Suder paid to consultants who were responsible for helping to
determine how the military should spend its substantial armaments budget. In
actuality, however, it was really problems with procurement that led to von der
Leyen’s political downfall in Germany. And it was no accident that it was as
minister of defense that von der Leyen encountered issues with procurement.
It’s the complexity of the Bundeswehr’s expenses—and the ubiquity of
lobbyists—that have long turned the powerful position into a pitfall. Germany’s
ministries of labor and of family deal with a relatively small number of
vendors, and much of their time is spent procuring items familiar with everyday
life. There are, of course, more complicated challenges in both of these
ministries as well, but nothing that approaches the difficulty of supplying a
modern army. Von der Leyen failed at it in a truly spectacular manner.
The Gorch
Fock, a sailing ship—with sails!—the German Navy used for training was docked
for repairs in 2015, briefly before von der Leyen assumed office. The estimated
cost was $11.6 million. When she left office in 2019, the estimated cost of
repairing the training vessel had risen to $163 million. The mission-critical
components of von der Leyen’s armament expenditures fared even worse. In 2017,
according to N-TV, 97 new weapons systems were delivered to the Bundeswehr.
Only 38 were functional.
Furthermore,
von der Leyen and Suder deleted cell phone data and censored documents in ways
that raised the suspicions of experts. Their evasions were so extreme that
Tobias Lindner, who is the Green Party’s defense expert in the Bundestag, asked
prosecutors to investigate von der Leyen for potential criminal wrongdoing. “It
goes beyond a political dispute,” Lindner told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2019.
“She’s made clearing up the case much more difficult and might be criminally
liable.”
Everyone
was largely willing to overlook von der Leyen’s fundamental dilettantism when
she was advocating for more social support for working mothers. And it remains
a remarkable testimony to the shared experiences of mothers in different
situations—as well as to von der Leyen’s solidarity with other German
mothers—that the reforms she introduced to help women balance career and family
have been so wildly successful.
It’s
lamentable, however, that Macron and the rest of the European Commission were
so dazzled by von der Leyen’s extraordinarily embodiment of “European culture”
that they refused to listen to the warnings of Germans who knew how badly she
bungled her last major procurement effort. Indeed, Germans mistrusted her so
badly that her appointment to lead the European Union was largely greeted with
skepticism in the country, although she is the first German to hold the office since
Walter Hallstein in 1958.
What’s
remarkable is not that she has failed so badly in the position. She rose, after
all, by playing on her family connections. What is, however, remarkable is she
has failed in so nearly the same way as in her last two positions. Running the
Bundeswehr, she entrusted the army’s procurement efforts to neoliberal market
logic espoused by management consultants, and things went poorly. A few years
later, responsible for Europe’s vaccine procurement efforts, she has faced criticism
for placing too much trust in the free market, failing to insist on centralized
control of vaccine production and distribution within the European Union. As a
result, people are dying.
For any
other politician, one suspects it would have been a career-ending mistake. But
the world works differently for von der Leyen, and the press has already
largely moved on from her disastrous mismanagement of Europe’s vaccine
procurement efforts. She is one of the hübsche, Germany’s privileged few.
Peter Kuras
is a writer, translator, and editor living in Berlin.
How the EU president’s family connections explain her
rise to power—and failures using it during the pandemic.
By Peter
Kuras
APRIL 30,
2021, 5:35 AM
Where does
the buck stop in the EU? There’s been plenty of finger pointing as Europeans try
to figure out why their own vaccination efforts lag so far behind much of the
rest of the world. In many ways, the EU’s failure to produce an adequate supply
of its vaccine is the kind of cataclysmic social failure that seems to indict
entire regimes, not simply individual actors. No one is powerful enough to
produce such a multifaceted failure on their own.
Yet much of
the blame and anger has deservedly settled on European Commission President
Ursula von der Leyen. To oust her, as former European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker recently demanded, would be understandable given her blind
trust in free market forces to administer Europe’s vaccination efforts and
flailing attempts to make up for the resulting shortages.
But it
would be a mistake to blame von der Leyen without understanding the broader
failures that installed a person with a middling record in such a powerful
position in the first place. The ultimate problem with von der Leyen is not
that she bungled Europe’s vaccine rollout. It’s that she obtained her position
through a kind of incestuous, image-obsessed politics that made bungling an
inevitability.
Germans
might have a reputation for being cold and rational, but mothers play a
surprisingly large role in the political culture. For the Nazis, motherhood was
the most a woman could hope to accomplish. They made Mother’s Day a national
holiday in Germany and rewarded exemplary mothers with the Mutterkreuz or
“Mother’s Cross.” Mothers were perhaps even more essential to the post-war era,
however, when Germany was largely rebuilt by the so-called Trümmerfrauen, women
who took their names from the piles of rubble they helped clear and repurpose
while their husbands and fathers awaited release from prisoner-of-war camps. In
this context, it can hardly be surprising that powerful women are almost
inevitably maternal in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel became a
notable exception but only because she overcame the burden—in the form of
public criticism and media skepticism—associated with her childlessness.
Merkel’s
understanding of this dynamic would be one way of explaining the trust she
placed in an unproven regional politician at the beginning of her
chancellorship. Von der Leyen certainly seemed the perfect embodiment of
motherhood: With seven children of her own, she had already climbed the lower
ranks of Germany’s political establishment while promoting an image of herself
as a kind of supermom, who packed lunchboxes and tended to boo-boos while
juggling affairs of state.
Today, the
image of the power-mom with a big job and a bigger brood has become commonplace
in global politics, especially on the right. Frauke Petry, former leader of
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, has been especially
conspicuous in using her six children to her political advantage, in ways
reminiscent of former U.S. Gov. Sarah Palin, whose five children and “grizzly
mama” moniker were constantly exploited for political gain when she shared a
ticket with then-U.S. Sen. John McCain in 2008.
Von der
Leyen, with fewer populist impulses than Petry or Palin, has found ways of
investing Germany’s politics of motherhood with new substance. Placed by Merkel
atop both the ministry for family affairs and the ministry for labor in
successive governments, von der Leyen was responsible for introducing new
directives intended to bring mothers back into the workforce. Among them were
the introduction of Elterngeld, a program that replaces a substantial portion
of the salaries of parents who take leave from their jobs to care for their
children, and a program that expands public day care programs so they are available
to children as young as 12 months old. Both programs have now become so
thoroughly a part of public life in Germany that it can be difficult to imagine
just how controversial they were when first introduced, but they each came
under fire, especially from conservatives who saw them as an affront to
traditional family structures and unnecessarily invasive to private life.
Von der
Leyen, with her seven children and strong ties within the Christian Democratic
Union (CDU), was the perfect person to push through these reforms. She served
as an endless example for women’s ability to do it all. But another key factor
often gets overlooked: her lineage. It should be no surprise that von der Leyen
has been adept at exploiting images of youth and family for political ends. She
learned at the hands of masters.
Von der
Leyen was herself one of seven children, though her sister Benita-Eva died
tragically in childhood. She was born in Brussels in 1958 to Ernst Albrecht and
Heidi Adele Stromeyer. It was a charmed, if difficult, moment in German
history. The Wirtschaftswunder made the country Europe’s economic engine, and
it was coupled with a newfound confidence in Germany’s central economic and
defensive role in the new world order. There were few more enthusiastic
beneficiaries of the rapidly shifting political landscape than the Albrecht
family. Albrecht was one of the European Union’s first civil servants. He was
just 37 years old when he was appointed to the highest civil-service office in
the Directorate-General for Competition, where he oversaw the nascent European Union’s
antitrust operations.
Albrecht
grew dissatisfied with life in Brussels, however, and returned to his ancestral
home in Hanover, Germany. He was soon elected to the position of minister
president (or governor, in U.S. diction) of Lower Saxony, an office he held
between 1976 and 1990. Albrecht had a reputation as a politician whose
influence exceeded his office, and he was a perennial pick for the CDU’s next
chancellor. Though he never held any higher office, he and his family were
constantly in the limelight. It can hardly be a surprise. The children were
blond, beautiful, and talented, and Stromeyer seemed as cool and sovereign in
front of the camera as her husband.
Indeed, in
some very real ways, Germany still thinks of von der Leyen as Albrecht’s little
girl. While the childless Merkel gained the nickname “mutti,” or mommy, von der
Leyen still carries the nickname given to her by her father: “Röschen” or
“Little Rosie.” To reduce von der Leyen to her father’s daughter, as one does
when one calls her “Röschen,” is to overlook the fact that she has far exceeded
his political accomplishments. It’s a terrible nickname. A better nickname
might have been, “die hübsche.” It means “the pretty one” in everyday parlance,
so it might hardly seem an improvement in terms of misogyny. But it also has
another history. In Hanover, the “hübsche Familien” were quasi-noble families
who had special access to the court. The Albrecht family have held this
status—and key positions in German politics—for more than 500 years.
Contemporary
Germany doesn’t seem like a place where aristocratic titles and family lineages
hold much sway—publicly, Germans are deeply committed to democratic culture and
have minimal interest in the kinds of aristocratic trappings that still seem to
capture British hearts. Yet the aristocracy have managed to maintain far more
of both its economic and political privileges than is commonly recognized.
Indeed, the Social Democratic Party’s youth committee proposed legislation to
ban the adoption of noble titles as parts of last names; had they succeeded,
the president of the European Commission would have had to drop the noble title
she took when she married her husband, and she would now simply be called
Ursula Leyen. The demand was not empty. Many nobles still move in an elite
world, where titles can have a real effect on a person’s chances of career
success and where bloodlines still trump accomplishments as a measure of a
person’s worth.
Although it
would be foolhardy to think von der Leyen could have achieved everything she
has without political talents of her own, it’s also important to recognize she
has always been granted a kind of privilege that far surpasses the parochial
advantages accorded to average Germans. Von der Leyen’s family tree traces a
legacy of power and brutality, incorporating not only some of Germany’s most
significant Nazis but also some of Britain’s largest slave traders and, through
marriage, some of the United States’ largest slave owners. Von der Leyen is
descended directly from James Ladson, who owned more than 200 slaves when the
Civil War broke out.
It might
seem petty to condemn someone for their ancestry: The sins of the father, after
all, shall not be visited on the son—or, in this case, the daughter. But von
der Leyen herself has invoked these forefathers unapologetically, if
unthinkingly. When von der Leyen was in college and a group of radical,
left-wing terrorists called the Red Army Faction (RAF) went on a violent crime
spree, Albrecht, concerned his family would become a target of the RAF,
implored his beloved Röschen to study abroad. She enrolled at the London School
of Economics under the name Rose Ladson. Few people at the time were as
conscious of the lingering legacies of slavery as we have now become, but her
choice to assume the name of her slave-holding ancestors was an indication
nevertheless about her comfort with unchallenged and inherited privilege.
Even if von
der Leyen was a little more reflective about her ancestry, it would be
necessary to point out the ruling classes that emerged centuries ago continue,
at least in some cases, to hold undue influence on European politics. The kinds
of family trees that seem to include a shameful number of moral transgressions
are still revered by much of the continent’s ruling elite. It’s no accident that
French President Emmanuel Macron is commonly cited as having first suggested
von der Leyen for the leadership position, citing her perfect French—the French
she learned as a child when her father was in Brussels—as evidence of her
cosmopolitan nature. But there are any number of Europeans who speak excellent
French, and Macron complimented more than her pronunciation. At a press
conference, Macron praised her “profoundly European culture” before going on to
say “she has the DNA of the European community,” referring explicitly to her
father’s important role in Europe’s bureaucratic apparatus more than 40 years
earlier.
However,
it’s not only that von der Leyen’s name and connections have provided her with
a kind of aristocratic sheen. Family was always crucial to her political
trajectory. She catapulted through the ranks of local government in Lower
Saxony largely because she could call her father’s former allies into line in
the service of Christian Wulff, the minister president of Lower Saxony when von
der Leyen began her career there in 2003 at the age of 45. These connections,
and the milieu in which they were established, were the precondition of von der
Leyen’s political maternity. Indeed, the power of her connections is evident in
the story of how she gained her first regional seat.
Her own
home in the tiny Hanover suburb of Ilten was represented by regional CDU
chairperson Jürgen Gansäuer, so she decided to try her political hand in her
hometown of Burgdorf, even though that seat had been held for almost 15 years
by a CDU politician named Lutz von der Heide. The first primary, which she won
by a single vote, was thrown out on a technicality. Her father jumped into
action, and with Wilfried Hasselmann, then the honorary chair of the CDU in
Hanover, he went on a charm offensive. Meanwhile, the regional edition of the
powerful tabloid Bild started a smear campaign against von der Heide. Though
von der Heide had held the seat for more than a decade and was, by all
accounts, a skilled politician, she won with two-thirds of the votes.
This
combination of high political connections and low-brow slander is typical of
the family’s political style. Albrecht, with his photogenic family and
conservative values, had always been a favorite of the paper. Von der Leyen
surpassed him. For years, she wrote a column for the tabloid, which is easily
the most powerful in Germany. Her political convictions played a secondary
role. Indeed, many of the columns seem as though they might be ad copy for some
strange German cousin of J.Crew—the images of the family relaxing, riding, and
playing music together could hardly have been more carefully staged had the
family been modeling the latest in seersucker and chambray rather than
advocating for their particular brand of politics.
It’s
unsurprising that von der Leyen’s successes at the labor and family ministries
served to make her, for a time, Merkel’s natural successor as leader of the
CDU. The policies—despite some complaints about inequities across social
classes—were widely popular on the left while von der Leyen herself was widely
popular among German centrists. Her next job, as Germany’s defense minister,
would have been a natural stepping stone to the top job; Helmut Schmidt and
Gerhard Schröder had already gone from that position to the German
chancellorship in prior decades. When von der Leyen entered office in 2013,
Merkel had already been chancellor for eight years, and it seemed likely that
von der Leyen, after a tenure leading the German military, would replace her.
But von der
Leyen’s career floundered at the defense ministry in ways that foreshadowed her
failures in Brussels—and were entirely in keeping with her earlier successes.
The ministries of family and labor are important sites of policy development,
and they allowed von der Leyen to flaunt her considerable skill at
redistributing tax money in ways that represented the needs of German families.
But the managerial challenges of the defense ministry are of an entirely
different order. It wasn’t just that von der Leyen had never previously shown
an interest in security policy. At her earlier posts, von der Leyen primarily
led small teams of loyal deputies; at defense, she suddenly was the boss of
hundreds of thousands of people and responsible for an annual budget of more
than $48 billion. In her many earlier successes, she never demonstrated a
particular skill at overseeing the sort of massive global logistic problems the
military confronts every day as a matter of course—or even at navigating the
internal dynamics of complex organizations like the Bundeswehr, Germany’s armed
forces.
Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, one of her first reforms at the defense ministry involved the creation
of army day care centers (or “Kitas”). Here, again, the kinds of care work von
der Leyen supported were critically important, both societally and militarily.
Germany abandoned mandatory military service just a few years before von der
Leyen began to serve as defense secretary, and the army was in the midst of
adjusting to its new, fully professional status. The Kitas was only one of
several measures von der Leyen introduced to make the army more family
friendly. She also attempted to tie soldiers’ leaves to school breaks, allow
soldiers to work part time while still progressing in their careers, and limit
the number of relocations soldiers with families had to endure. One shouldn’t
underestimate the importance of these measures; not only were they crucial to
maintaining a standing army, but there is also reason to believe a more
family-friendly military is less susceptible to right-wing extremism than one
that relies on a more traditional model of the family.
But if von
der Leyen’s powerful connections, aristocratic comportment, and media savvy
were enough to carry her through stints leading Germany’s ministries of family
and labor, they failed her in her role as the head of Germany’s military. Can
it be any surprise, really, that a person who had neither any previous
experience in defense policy or strategy nor substantial experience managing large
organizations in the private or public sectors should fail in such a complex
and varied role?
Von der
Leyen held the post as defense minister from 2013 to 2019, a remarkable run
considering her inexperience. But when things came crashing down, they came
crashing down quickly—and exposed a slew of mismanagement, incompetence, and
potential corruption. The scandal is usually called the “consultant affair” due
to the untold hundreds of millions of dollars von der Leyen and her chief
deputy Katrin Suder paid to consultants who were responsible for helping to
determine how the military should spend its substantial armaments budget. In
actuality, however, it was really problems with procurement that led to von der
Leyen’s political downfall in Germany. And it was no accident that it was as
minister of defense that von der Leyen encountered issues with procurement.
It’s the complexity of the Bundeswehr’s expenses—and the ubiquity of
lobbyists—that have long turned the powerful position into a pitfall. Germany’s
ministries of labor and of family deal with a relatively small number of
vendors, and much of their time is spent procuring items familiar with everyday
life. There are, of course, more complicated challenges in both of these
ministries as well, but nothing that approaches the difficulty of supplying a
modern army. Von der Leyen failed at it in a truly spectacular manner.
The Gorch
Fock, a sailing ship—with sails!—the German Navy used for training was docked
for repairs in 2015, briefly before von der Leyen assumed office. The estimated
cost was $11.6 million. When she left office in 2019, the estimated cost of
repairing the training vessel had risen to $163 million. The mission-critical
components of von der Leyen’s armament expenditures fared even worse. In 2017,
according to N-TV, 97 new weapons systems were delivered to the Bundeswehr.
Only 38 were functional.
Furthermore,
von der Leyen and Suder deleted cell phone data and censored documents in ways
that raised the suspicions of experts. Their evasions were so extreme that
Tobias Lindner, who is the Green Party’s defense expert in the Bundestag, asked
prosecutors to investigate von der Leyen for potential criminal wrongdoing. “It
goes beyond a political dispute,” Lindner told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2019.
“She’s made clearing up the case much more difficult and might be criminally
liable.”
Everyone
was largely willing to overlook von der Leyen’s fundamental dilettantism when
she was advocating for more social support for working mothers. And it remains
a remarkable testimony to the shared experiences of mothers in different
situations—as well as to von der Leyen’s solidarity with other German
mothers—that the reforms she introduced to help women balance career and family
have been so wildly successful.
It’s
lamentable, however, that Macron and the rest of the European Commission were
so dazzled by von der Leyen’s extraordinarily embodiment of “European culture”
that they refused to listen to the warnings of Germans who knew how badly she
bungled her last major procurement effort. Indeed, Germans mistrusted her so
badly that her appointment to lead the European Union was largely greeted with
skepticism in the country, although she is the first German to hold the office since
Walter Hallstein in 1958.
What’s
remarkable is not that she has failed so badly in the position. She rose, after
all, by playing on her family connections. What is, however, remarkable is she
has failed in so nearly the same way as in her last two positions. Running the
Bundeswehr, she entrusted the army’s procurement efforts to neoliberal market
logic espoused by management consultants, and things went poorly. A few years
later, responsible for Europe’s vaccine procurement efforts, she has faced criticism
for placing too much trust in the free market, failing to insist on centralized
control of vaccine production and distribution within the European Union. As a
result, people are dying.
For any
other politician, one suspects it would have been a career-ending mistake. But
the world works differently for von der Leyen, and the press has already
largely moved on from her disastrous mismanagement of Europe’s vaccine
procurement efforts. She is one of the hübsche, Germany’s privileged few.
Peter Kuras
is a writer, translator, and editor living in Berlin.
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