Ursula von der Leyen: Most Powerful Woman in Europe used to living in office

By then, the most powerful woman in Europe was used to living in the office. Her position doesn’t come with an official residence, and whenever she isn’t travelling 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 declared 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 package. “It was very much crisis mode,” she recalls.

It was hardly what von der Leyen was expecting when she became the first woman in history—and the first German in more than 50 years—to lead the European Commission. (The Commission 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 million people—to agree on E.U. policy and budgets, and to propose legislation. When she took office in December 2019, her focus was on digital and green policies, as well as gender equality, according to Time magazine.

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.”

As in the pandemic, von der Leyen has demonstrated “her ability to be a kind of fixer-leader, in terms of brokering solutions and finding a consensus between member states,” says Susi Dennison, a senior policy fellow at the European 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 accountability for Russian war criminals, insisting that President Vladimir Putin must “pay a very high price” for his brutality.

During the course of our two conversations in May, she refuses to even entertain 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 Russian oil and gas are funding Putin’s brutality. 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 Brussels, 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 devastation in Ukraine—one that inspires idealism, rather than exhaustion.

For von der Leyen, who is leading the bloc at a more significant inflection point than anything 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 democracy for granted. Her father Ernst Albrecht worked for the organization that would eventually become the E.U., and she spent her childhood cocooned 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 divided Germany; her father was later elected to state parliament as a politician for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. Even now, von der Leyen can recall the fear she felt crossing from West Germany into Berlin. “God, you were just scared that anything might happen,” she says, with a shudder. “You felt no protection where the rule of law was concerned.”

Von der Leyen, who moves easily between English, German, and French, is very much a product of the postwar European 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 Economics. “I lived far more than I studied,” she told German newspaper Die Zeit in 2016. Cosmopolitan London gave her “an inner freedom” that she still treasures—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 graduated from Hannover Medical School and began working as a gynecologist. In 1992, the couple moved to California with their three children when Heiko was offered a role on Stanford University’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 politics 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 always seemed like a viable career path.

In 2005, Angela Merkel appointed her the Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. A protégé 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 offered two additional months for fathers who took leave, and increased the number of state-funded day-care centers for children under 3.

As her career took off, her husband assumed much of the childcare responsibilities. She was always under pressure to explain how she did it. “Never would you ask a male minister: How are you managing with your seven children at home? I hated that.”

In 2013, she was appointed Germany’s first female Defense Minister, widely considered the hardest job in Berlin, not to mention the most stereotypically “male.” The woman who was touted as Germany’s next leader—indeed, her 2015 biography had the title Chancellor in Reserve—was in a precarious position by 2019, tainted by a series of scandals.

It was French President Emmanuel Macron who saved her career, putting her name forward when negotiations for a new President of the European Commission were blocked.

Von der Leyen emerged as a surprise winner—thanks to a controversial backroom deal that got her one of Europe’s top jobs when she hadn’t even campaigned for it. By then, she was such a divisive figure at home that Germany was the only E.U. member state to abstain from the vote to nominate her.

She is reluctant to dwell on that period. “You learn a lot where leadership is concerned by not only being successful, but also if things go wrong,” she says simply. Though she’s the first woman to serve as President of the Commission, she says the world she now inhabits is “much easier” than the defense ministry.