Matthew Lynn Matthew Lynn

Ursula von der Leyen has always left a trail of disaster

Photo by Francisco Seco / POOL / AFP

The German Army had to join a NATO exercise with broomsticks because they didn’t have any rifles. It’s special forces became a hotbed for right-wing extremism. Working mothers were meant to get federally-funded childcare, to help fix the country’s demographic collapse, but it never arrived, and the birth rate carried on falling. Every child was supposed to get a hot lunch at school every day, but somehow or other it didn’t quite happen. There is a common thread running through the career of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission. A series of catastrophic misjudgements, and a failure to deliver.

In a brutal examination of her record this weekend, the influential German news magazine Spiegel concluded that VdL, as they refer to her in Berlin, was good at only one thing: evading responsibility for a series of disasters as family minister, labour and social affairs minister and then defence minister. ‘She always acted as if she would do everything different – better – than her predecessor. It frequently sounded as though von der Leyen planned to reinvent whatever department or ministry she had just assumed control of, making it more functional and glamorous at the same time,’ argued Spiegel. ‘By the time it became necessary to dive into the sordid details she had usually moved on.’

The vaccine debacle unfolding across the continent won’t have come as any surprise to those who have followed von der Leyen’s career.

That analysis has a lot of truth in it. As family minister she was appointed by Angela Merkel to restore the nation’s fertility. But the dazzling array of policies never arrived. At the social affairs ministry a plan for hot lunches went wrong. And most spectacularly, as defence minister she presided over a series of procurement scandals that left the Bundeswehr – not an organisation ever noted for its sense of humour – furious.

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