'VDL brought recognition from the top for a group that often feels their contribution to society is at best taken for granted and at worst forgotten'
For Ursula von der Leyen – known in Eurospeak as VDL – winning a second five-year term as European Commission president must feel something of a double-edged victory. She campaigned long and hard, but will be presiding over a new and potentially fractious group of commissioners from the EU's 27 member states.
Problems are already mounting. She will face the challenge of the far right's growing influence over French politics, including demands for France to weaken its links with the EU. She also faces the challenge of maintaining unity over support for Ukraine, with this brought into sharp focus now because Hungary, with its pro-Putin prime minister, Viktor Orban, is driving policy during its six-month term in the rotating EU presidency.
Despite those challenges the approval of VDL by the members of the European parliament will bring some welcome and much needed stability to the EU. She has her critics, but is generally seen to have been successful in her first term. That brought many challenges, including Ukraine, Covid and the fallout from the implementation of Brexit.
Big as those were the challenge now of holding the EU together will be even more challenging. One group pleased to see VDL continuing in her role is the European farming lobby, led by the umbrella organisation COPA. It developed a strong relationship with the Commission president as the farm protests spread across Europe. It convinced her to buy into the challenge of solving the problems highlighted by farmers and rural communities. It was no surprise COPA was to the fore in welcoming her reappointment, urging her to continue work on the plans for agricultural reform she launched.
It was no easy victory for VDL in the end. She needed support from a majority of MEPs, which meant a minimum of 360 and she secured 401 votes in a secret ballot. She was opposed by the far right and the far left, but won the support of the dwindling number of greens. Her own party, the Christian Democrat European People's Party, is comfortably the biggest in the parliament but she needed support beyond that to win.
She now has a strong mandate to lead the new Commission that will be in place in October in the direction she believes is right for Europe. That guarantees continued support for Ukraine, but the bigger battle will be the division in the EU from key countries having right wing governments opposed to traditional liberal thinking from Brussels on issues such as EU expansion, ethics, trade liberalisation and migration. There will be days ahead when VDL will wonder why she was so keen to secure the job.
The relationship between COPA and VDL is interesting. It convinced her to see that something needed to be done for farmers to counter the pressure for regulation to make the industry less productive and less globally competitive. COPA persuaded her to praise the 'daily contribution' of farmers to food security for Europe through the challenging times brought about by Covid and then by inflation in input costs and food prices. This was an important recognition from the top for a group that often feels their contribution to society is at best taken for granted and at worst forgotten.
She also pledged to do more to return to the founding principles of the Treaty of Rome that set up the EEC by working to end the social and financial divide between urban and rural areas, with the former getting richer while rural areas struggle to maintain populations.
Before the end of her first term Von der Leyen opened a debate on not only simplifying the CAP but making it more relevant for the decades that lie ahead than those that created it. This was around simplification and recognition of the importance of a secure food supply. She also did well in selling farmers the case that tackling climate change is in their interest because they are the first to suffer the fallout from extreme weather.
These were easy commitments for someone ending their term of office, but now she is under new pressure to deliver. With the green influence reduced an initial test will be whether she will battle to save nature restoration legislation, widely seen as anti-farmer, which squeaked through the European parliament last year, but it now stalled because member states have withdrawn support.
This will be a big test of whether VDL means what she says about heeding farmers and rural communities.
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