Into the
Breach
HOW URSULA VON DER LEYEN IS LEADING THE E.U. THROUGH
YET ANOTHER CRISIS BY NAINA BAJEKAL/DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
President Ursula
von der Leyen
at the European
Commission
headquarters in
Brussels on May 27WORLD
This winTer, as The e.u.’s Top official
worked around the clock in Brussels, she hoped for
something unusual: that it would all be for noth-
ing. It had been just over two years since Ursula von
der Leyen became President of the European Com-
mission, and with Russian troops massed along
Ukraine’s borders, her job was to coordinate with
E.U. member states on potential sanctions against
Russia. “We were working day and night,” she says
“but we hoped we’d never, ever use it.”
By then, the most powerful woman in Europe
was used to living at the office. Her position doesn’t
come with an official residence, and whenever she
isn’t traveling for work or making rare trips home to
see her family in Germany, von der Leyen sleeps in
a 270-sq.-ft. room right by her desk. That unusual
decision proved to be convenient when, 102 days
into her term, the World Health Organization de-
clared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020. It
soon seemed like the E.U. might fall apart, with
fierce disagreements over border closures and
tense negotiations on an economic rescue pack-
age. “It was very much crisis mode,” she recalls.
It was hardly what von der Leyen was expect-
ing when she became the first woman in history—
and the first German in more than 50 years—to
lead the European Commission. (The Commis-
sion functions as the E.U.’s executive branch but
is also the sole body capable of proposing new
laws.) The President’s day-to-day job is to get the
College of Commissioners—the representatives
of the 27 E.U. member states, taking in 477 mil-
lion people—to agree on E.U. policy and bud-
gets, and to propose legislation. When she took
office in December 2019, her focus was on digi-
tal and green policies, as well as gender equality.
Instead, the agenda has been dominated by war
and disease. Just as the pandemic was beginning
to recede —Europe’s COVID-19 death toll now
surpasses 2 million—the next crisis began, when
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on
Feb. 24. “It was a nightmare,” she says, “but we were
prepared, and then we really could act rapidly.”
How rapidly took the world by surprise. Within
a week of the invasion, Brussels had already ap-
proved three packages of sanctions against Rus-
sia, targeting everything from Russian banks to
Kremlin- controlled media outlets. For the first
time ever, the E.U. said it would send weap-
ons to a country under attack. Dynamics on thePHOTOGRAPH BY DANA LIXENBERG FOR TIME