Bigger threats, messier politics: How things now change for von der Leyen

BRUSSELS ― Welcome to the real start of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as European Commission president.

On Thursday, the German politician easily defeated a vote of no-confidence brought by far-right politicians, convincing a comfortable majority of EU lawmakers (among those present) to reject the motion and keep her in office.

The center-right European People’s Party “has shown again today that we are the stability factor for the EU project,” Manfred Weber, von der Leyen’s main conservative ally in Parliament, crowed after the vote.

And yet the victory comes at considerable cost for the Commission president. Not only was she forced into publicly defending her actions in the so-called Pfizergate scandal, she also had to grant considerable concessions to the Socialists and Democrats group — her purported allies — to fend off a threat that their lawmakers would abstain in Thursday’s vote.

“I think that she [von der Leyen] finally understood what is happening in Parliament,” trumpeted MEP René Repasi, head of the German SPD delegation in Parliament.

Other groups are watching — and drawing conclusions.

One is that it’s surprisingly easy to bring a vote of no confidence that has the potential to bring down the European Union’s most powerful institution: only 72 votes are needed.

The other is that one doesn’t necessarily need to go as far as bringing down the Commission president. A well-formulated threat to inflict political damage and impede her wider agenda will do the job nicely.

There was nothing, in theory, to stop parties from engaging in this sort of power play prior to Thursday’s vote.

But the spectacle of seeing von der Leyen so vulnerable has unleashed something in her rivals and allies alike, emboldening them to criticize her in ways they would not have done before and normalizing a form of power politics that’s more common in national parliaments than it is in Brussels.

In that sense, Thursday was a milestone: the true political start of von der Leyen’s second term in power.

“The Commission must stop rolling back the Green Deal under the fallacy of cutting red tape and deliver on promises made,” Bas Eickhout, president of the Greens/EFA Group, warned.

Who will move against her next?

The motion of no-confidence came from a branch of the populist right, including some lawmakers who lean toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and was thus easy to dismiss by all mainstream parties.

But the next one may well come from a Left-Green bloc furious over the fact that von der Leyen is unwinding much of her green agenda. With a combined 99 seats in Parliament, they would have no trouble meeting the threshold to bring a no-confidence vote.

Even so, the most serious threat to von der Leyen comes from members of the coalition that helped her win power in 2019 and 2024, namely the liberal Renew and S&D groups.

Neither of these groups — which both lost considerable ground in the last election — has an interest in toppling von der Leyen as she remains their best hope of getting at least some of their policy wishes into law.

But they will have learned that quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Commission may not be the best way to get what they want. If anything, the lesson from the past few weeks is that the opposite is true: Those who shout loudest and threaten the most effectively get their way.

Once learned, that lesson may prove impossible to unlearn for a typically meek European Parliament.

Max Griera and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.