36 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
Continent have continued to shift diz-
zyingly fast, with Germany shedding de-
cades of pacifism to send heavy weap-
ons to Ukraine, and Finland and Sweden
abandoning their long-standing neu-
trality to apply for NATO membership.
As in the pandemic, von der Leyen
has demonstrated “her ability to be a
kind of fixer-leader, in terms of broker-
ing solutions and finding a consensus
between member states,” says Susi Den-
nison, a senior policy fellow at the Eu-
ropean Council on Foreign Relations.
Others see her as not just a consensus-
builder but a voice of moral clarity. In
April, she was the first Western leader to
visit Ukraine after the Russian invasion,
addressing President Zelensky as “dear
Volodymyr” and handing him an initial
questionnaire to join the E.U. “Your fight
is our fight,” she said. In Strasbourg the
next month, she demanded accountabil-
ity for Russian war criminals, insisting
that President Vladimir Putin must “pay
a very high price” for his brutality.
During the course of our two conver-
sations in May, she refuses to even en-
tertain future relations with Moscow.
“Without a change in leadership, I do
not see an improving relationship,” she
says. “Trust is completely broken.”
Critics say Brussels could still do
more; that member states paying a
total of some $1 billion a day for Rus-
sian oil and gas are funding Putin’s bru-
tality. Even so, many acknowledge that
the bloc has acted with uncharacteristic
speed. “We proved that democracy can
deliver,” von der Leyen says.
Given years of deep divisions in Brus-
sels, how long until all this newfound
unity frays is an inevitable question.
Yet just as the E.U. was born out of the
wreckage of the Second World War, a
new revitalized European order could
well emerge from the current devasta-
tion in Ukraine—one that inspires ide-
alism, rather than exhaustion. For von
der Leyen, who is leading the bloc at a
more significant inflection point than at
any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the task is momentous: “A democracy
can always fail if we don’t stand up for
it on a daily basis.”
Born in Brussels in 1958, von der
Leyen says she grew up taking de-
mocracy for granted. Her father Ernst
Albrecht worked for the organization
that would eventually become the
E.U., and she spent her childhood co-
cooned in an elite world, attending the
European School in the Belgian capital
and later spending her free time riding
horses. As the third of seven children—
who would go on to have seven children
of her own—she became an expert in
balancing competing interests. “What
I learned from early on is that I’m doing
best if the group is fine,” she says. “I’m a
deep believer in constant negotiation.”
In 1971, the family moved to a di-
vided Germany; her father was later
elected to state parliament as a politi-
cian for the center-right Christian Dem-
ocratic Union (CDU) party. Even now,
von der Leyen can recall the fear she felt
crossing from West Germany into Ber-
lin. “God, you were just scared that any-
thing might happen,” she says, with a
shudder. “You felt no protection where
the rule of law was concerned.”Von der Leyen, who moves easily be-
tween English, German, and French, is
very much a product of the postwar Eu-
ropean order. But for a brief period, she
was more likely to be found at a Soho
pub or a punk concert than hobnobbing
with the children of politicians. In 1978,
with her father facing threats that she
would be kidnapped, she adopted the
pseudonym “Rose Ladson” and went
to study at the London School of Eco-
nomics. “I lived far more than I studied,”
she told German newspaper Die Zeit in- Cosmopolitan London gave her
“an inner freedom” that she still trea-
sures—though she tells me her love of
punk has now waned in favor of classical
music and, most of all, Adele.
She eventually returned to Germany,
where she met her future husband,
physician Heiko von der Leyen, in the
University of Göttingen choir. They
married in 1986; soon after, she grad-
uated from Hannover Medical School
and began working as a gynecologist.
In 1992, the couple moved to Califor-
nia with their three children when Heiko
was offered a role on Stanford Univer-
sity’s faculty. Ursula had given up work
by then, but was surprised at how ready
Stanford was to support them with
childcare. Back in Germany, she says,
the expectation was that a good mother
stays home with the kids. (That stigma
persists to this day; in 2019, two-thirds
of working mothers in Germany with a
child under 18 worked part-time, rather
than full time.) “It was very modern and
what I took back home was: never again
will anybody give me a bad conscience
about wanting to work and have kids.”
She became involved in local poli-
tics for the CDU after they returned to
Germany in 2006. Though she disliked
being compared to her father, she says
his experience in politics meant it al-
ways seemed like a viable career path. In
2005, Angela Merkel appointed her the
Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Se-
nior Citizens, Women and Youth. A pro-
tégé of Merkel, von der Leyen became
a rising star in Germany and proved to
be an unexpectedly radical force for
the center-right party. She introduced
a paid parental-leave scheme that of-
fered two additional months for fathers
who took leave, and increased the num-
ber of state-funded day-care centers for
children under 3. As her career took off,
her husband assumed much of the child-
care responsibilities. She was always
under pressure to explain how she did
it: “Never would you ask a male minis-
ter, How are you managing with your
seven children at home? I hated that.”
In 2013, she was appointed Ger-
many’s first female Defense Minister,
widely considered the hardest job in
Berlin, not to mention the most stereo-
typically “male.” The woman who was
touted as Germany’s next leader—in-
deed, her 2015 biography had the title
Chancellor in Reserve—was in a precar-
ious position by 2019, tainted by a se-
ries of scandals. It was French President
Emmanuel Macron who saved her ca-
reer, putting her name forward when
negotiations for a new President of the
European Commission were blocked.
Von der Leyen emerged as a surprise‘What I learned
from early on
is that I’m doing
best if the group
is fine.’
WORLD