Ursula von der leyen

When the European Union finally made the decision to ban 90 percent of Russia’s crude oil imports by the end of the year, the bureaucrats in Brussels were jubilant. The EU’s adoption of oil sanctions was thought be a big blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who depends on the revenue generated by his country's oil exports to fund his war in Ukraine. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why European officials were so thrilled. The EU imported 2.2 million barrels per day of Russian crude last year, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in profits for the Kremlin every month.

Mateusz Morawiecki insists his government does not want to take Poland out of the EU. ‘Eighty-eight per cent of Poles are in favour of EU membership and half of these are our (Law and Justice party) voters,’ the Polish Prime Minister told the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week. But Morawiecki didn’t exactly seem committed to the EU on Tuesday when he locked horns in a fiery debate with the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over Poland’s challenge to the bloc’s legal order. With Morawiecki refusing to back down and von der Leyen assuring MEPs that Brussels would move against controversial Polish legal reforms, it seemed, more than ever, that Polexit really could be on the table.

The bald guy who leads the Social Democrats. The earnest looking Green lady. Or perhaps the guy in the charcoal-grey suit who leads the oddly named Free Democrats — free from what exactly? — who may end up picking the next chancellor. Lots of commentators will argue for a long time about who is the real winner of the German elections. But in fact there can be no real dispute about who has come out in a far stronger position. The President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. A power vacuum in Berlin will be filled by a hyper-active, ambitious Commission There are two reasons for this. First, she is now by far the most powerful German politician.

How well has the EU dealt with the pandemic? According to Ursula von der Leyen, the bloc's performance has been world beating. In an address yesterday, the Commission president lauded her own performance while claiming that the EU had proven its detractors wrong. During her so-called 'state of the union', she said: We all heard the nagging questions, especially in the first months of this pandemic: aren't nation states better equipped to fight this crisis? Isn't our union of 27 too slow to react? And our processes too cumbersome and our stakeholders too diverse? Today I am here to say: Europe has proven these claims wrong...Most importantly we decided to procure vaccines together in our union.

Ursula von der Leyen isn't particularly keen on diplomatic protocol. Earlier this year, in a bid to get EU hands on British bound vaccines, the Commission announced its intention to implement a hard Northern Irish border — without bothering to tell either Dublin or Belfast. (Naturally, that fit of international irreverence was blamed on a Brussels subordinate).  Then we had sofagate, which overshadowed what should have been a show of European strength in the face of Turkish President Erdogan. VdL instead decided to take the opportunity to make a fuss about a chair being offered to a man — despite Council President Charles Michel's superiority to her in the EU's order of precedence.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has blasted claims by a senior Eurocrat that the UK is hampering the bloc's vaccine rollout, calling the questionable assertions 'completely false'. Charles Michel, president of the European Council, initially argued that Britain had imposed an 'outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components' leaving the country in an EU blog on Tuesday. (Michel then subtly soften his claim after commentators pointed out there was no such 'outright ban', instead he said there were 'different ways of imposing bans or restrictions on vaccines'.) But London was having none of it.

Something has gone badly wrong with the EU's rollout of the Covid vaccine. Yet in its response to this debacle, Brussels seems determined to double down, engaging in behaviour of the pettiest kind as it blames everyone but itself for what has happened. 'The companies must deliver', Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission's president said this week, as she announced the launch of a 'vaccine export transparency mechanism'. In reality, this plan to oblige companies to notify the commission when vaccines leave the EU (into Britain, for example) is an attempt to pile pressure on the pharmaceutical firms who have given us the only way out of the situation we find ourselves in.

It took Brussels and Beijing seven years to agree an investment deal. A deal that, until its conclusion a few days ago, had been largely eclipsed by the Brexit process. Once the negotiations had concluded, however, the European side suddenly came under intense criticism — China, detractors said, was not the sort of country the EU should be cosying up to. That the deal was finalised on the penultimate day of the year was a sure sign that Angela Merkel was pushing for closure. She had stated before the pandemic that advancing EU-China relations would be one of the goals of Germany’s EU Council presidency (now passed on to Portugal). A goal for Germany perhaps, but there was substantial opposition to the deal among European heads of states.