The EU usually goes for Commission president bosses which are obscure as they are incompetent.

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Ursula von der Leyen wants to have a second term as European Commission president and she has the political support from the European parliament’s most powerful pan-European conservative bloc to get it. But can Europe, indeed the world, put up with this German’s narrow view of Europe’s role in a new multipolar world order when, in so many respects, she is like a twin of Joe Biden – stuck in the 1980s with their views about America running everything and naturally hating Russia and blaming Putin for almost everything which she can get away with.

Her second term bid is not unprecedented as José Manuel Barroso went for two terms, plagued by some rumours that he did it to avoid a paedophile investigation in Portugal soiling his political legacy. And so the EU will not be breaking new ground here. But the system of electing a European Commission president – member states each present their own candidate which is ultimately voted in by MEPs – might have other ideas for Ursula who also will look at the extended term as a way of avoiding awkward graft prosecutions which are inevitably going to arise when she leaves office. Her murky relationship with Pfizer, which sold the EU billions of dollars of vaccines under her watch, while the whole affair was shrouded in secrecy – only to reveal that her husband was working for a biotech company which, strangely, received millions of euros in grants and might be connected to Pfizer – might catch up with her. Presently, and it should come as no surprise, the EU’s own internal watchdogs and anti-fraud units have only carried out the symbolic proceedings to probe her relationship with Pfizer and have found no graft or conflict of interest. But it is the New York Times which is suing her for pretending to no longer have critical text messages to Pfizer bosses about the vaccine deal, which still hangs in the air like a bad smell.

It’s not only graft which might raise its head when MEPs cross-examine her in the parliament as part of one of their first important tasks in the late summer of this year. It’s also the fact that many MEPs simply don’t like her and don’t trust her and, given that we can assume more far right MEPs joining the parliament, this number might be considerable – leading to her being a runner but not succeeding in getting the second term. Many MEPs from the present term simply don’t like how she bungled most of the crises which hit her, almost from day one in the job and have left the EU with not only a constellation of new problems – immigration being a key one – but also spiralling debts. Of course, “Ursula” as Joe Biden calls her, has the answer for this last mess. Increase the EU budget, she simply states as her opening speech at the Munich Security Conference.

Many will argue, in the European parliament and on other corners of the EU, that she was simply out of her league in the job in the first place. A nobody from the obscurity of German politics which gave the gynaecologist the opportunity to fanny around in the EU and reap the benefits. The EU usually goes for Commission president bosses which are obscure as they are incompetent.

From the moment she took office, barely 100 days into the job, the pandemic was followed by a spike in irregular migration, Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, record-breaking inflation coupled with the disruption of energy supplies and a general demise which hit many EU countries very hard, with Germany, her own country, coming off the worst.  She will be remembered by some for being very slow off the mark to tackle the virus head on, waiting for a French vaccine to be available in preference of an American one, which cost many lives, before the humiliation of having to buy the Pfizer one in any case finally was inevitable – while she begged Putin in Moscow for the Russian one.

According to Politico, a pro-establishment U.S. website which is staunchly pro-EU as well, she “spearheaded a history-making €750-billion recovery fund to jolt the bloc’s economy after crippling months of paralysis. Months later, she oversaw an unprecedented common procurement of vaccines to ensure all member states had access to the life-saving treatment on equal conditions”. A cruder, less kind translation of this euro speak would be “she borrowed a fantastic amount of money which the next generation of voters will have to pay for in higher taxes and hesitated while several hundred thousand Europeans dropped dead particularly in Italy and Spain.

Von der Leyen is seen as a Biden clone in many ways. Indeed, some may argue that it has been Biden’s decision to extend her term as, in the end, he has chosen someone else to take over the NATO secretary general’s job when it comes up exactly at the same time as the EU has its five-year overture in June. Biden has been searching for someone as stupid as Jens Stoltenberg, an arduous task in itself, but it would seem by the decision to keep his German dachshund puppy in Brussels, it would appear that he has succeeded.