Ursula von der Leyen’s secret climate crusade  (2024)

Was she cowed, craven or calculating?

When Ursula von der Leyen launched her campaign for a second term as president of the European Commission, she did so amid the tumult of two wars on Europe’s doorstep, a farmers’ uprising on the byways of Brussels, and the breath of the hottest year in recorded human history hanging in the air.

She could have used this latter crisis — climate change — to demonstrate her credentials as a transformational leader ahead of June’s European Parliament election. But as she campaigned across the bloc, von der Leyen largely skimmed over one of the defining achievements of her first term: the world’s only continent-scale package of climate laws, known as the European Green Deal.

Her reticence capped a series of concessions to polluting industries, farmers and her own center-right European People’s Party (EPP) which, under Manfred Weber’s leadership, has led a brutal revolt against parts of her green agenda.

Now, everywhere she goes, von der Leyen is asked if she is walking away from her grandest vision for a net-zero Europe. “If a leader is playing both sides — something that we are experiencing now — you have a problem,” said Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Ribera, a socialist who is campaigning to run EU green policy after the election.

Others see her gear-change as a reversion to type, that as a former German defense minister, von der Leyen is just refocusing on building Europe’s military might.

In the cafés and bars of Brussels, gossip-obsessed EU officials and hangers-on have been speculating that von der Leyen was never really a climate evangelist at all, and that after bowing to young activists in 2019 she was now kowtowing to the tractors and the factory owners.

“Apparently she is more of a politician than I’d hoped,” said one senior EU official, nursing the bitter dregs of an espresso.

But all these versions of von der Leyen miss one vital truth that has, until now, been largely hidden: She fought doggedly behind the scenes in Brussels to get her Green Deal done. The question now is whether she would back the climate cause so strongly again, if she were given the chance of a second term.

For this article, POLITICO conducted interviews with 18 close observers of her first mandate including senior EPP operatives, high-ranking Commission officials, members of the European Parliament and the heads of major NGOs. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive and bitterly fought battle to decide how green the EU really wants to be.

The Knights of the Round Table

Like heat trapped in a greenhouse, anger at creeping EU environmentalism had been building within von der Leyen’s EPP for years.

It finally exploded in March 2023, when an insurgent farmers’ party rode a wave of rural discontent over environment laws into first place in the Dutch provincial elections. The EPP’s local wing suffered most, losing 40 percent of its seats.

In Brussels, Weber’s phone began to ring. Conservative members of the European Parliament from across the EU, many of whom drew a significant share of their votes from rural areas, were freaking out about losing their seats in the 2024 election. The Green Deal had gone too far, they said: Von der Leyen had lost her way, abandoning her conservative principles and caving in to socialism. Something must be done.

It was the moment Weber had been preparing for.

His rivalry with von der Leyen is well documented, as between two Germans at the pinnacle of European conservatism.

But Weber had expected to be the next Commission president himself in 2019, only to be supplanted by von der Leyen at the behest of French President Emmanuel Macron. Tensions have never been far from the surface since then; in 2022 Weber accused von der Leyen of running a Commission obsessed with regulation, calling for a moratorium on new rules.

“They’re not moving in together,” one EPP official noted dryly.

In separate statements to POLITICO, von der Leyen’s campaign team and Weber denied a rift, both calling the relationship “very good.”

Weber insists he was early to grasp the anger of rural voters because he himself is one. Long before the farmers were in the streets of Brussels, he says, they were grumbling beside him in his church in the Bavarian village of Wildenberg (pop. 1,409). “So often they see us, as European politicians, lecturing them and not listening enough to them,” he told POLITICO in a November interview.

According to the EPP official, Weber and his allies came to see themselves as like the Arthurian knights of the Round Table: sworn to protect conservative, free-market values in a land unhinged by green-left apostasy. The focus of their quest was von der Leyen’s unholy alliance with Frans Timmermans, the socialist in charge of the Commission’s climate policy.

Samsom’s puzzle

These days, EPP operatives and politicians speak of Timmermans and his chief of staff Diederik Samsom with a mix of loathing and grudging admiration for the way they forced the Green Deal through the Brussels machine.

In mid-2021, the Dutch pair proposed a dizzying package of regulations, funds and restrictions aimed at delivering the EU’s new climate goals. It was met with shocked resistance from across the College of Commissioners — a 27-member, cross-party group drawn from every EU country that acts as von der Leyen’s ministry.

But when the commissioners and their staffers approached Samsom — an alpha-bureaucrat who once led the Netherlands’ Labor Party — with demands to lower the impacts on a favored sector, they would be met with a smile and a shrug.

Okay, he would say. And then give his guests an unsolicited lesson in arithmetic: The EU had agreed to lower emissions by a specific amount this decade, so if automakers were to get a free ride, should it be the farmers who do more? Or should it be added to the cost of home heating?

The Dutch pair were “quite impossible to get a grip on,” the EPP official said.

To illustrate the point, Samsom brought a spherical wooden puzzle, a child’s toy of interlocking pieces, to a key meeting with the chiefs of staff of the commissioners.

Over more than 30 straight hours, the group tried to pick apart the climate plans, arguing that the burden would fall too heavily on this sector or that company. Samsom repeatedly held up the puzzle, which had the same number of components as the legislative package, and challenged anyone in the room to remove a piece and still keep the sphere.

Besides those in the room at the time, very few know just how far von der Leyen backed Timmermans and his infuriating aide in this moment. At times she and Timmermans stood alone in supporting the package against the other 25 commissioners, who ranged from concerned to vigorously opposed. Together, on file after file, they faced down the wall of resistance from the rest of the Commission, according to two people familiar with the internal debates.

Ultimately, the college signed off unanimously, Samsom’s puzzle stayed largely intact — and the EPP’s view that von der Leyen had lost her way grew more entrenched.

When the Commission president first announced the Green Deal, back in December 2019, she understood she was writing her own place in history. “This is,” she said, “Europe’s man on the moon moment.” It turned out to be far harder and more expensive than the Apollo program.

But few leaders can credibly claim that kind of legacy. According to four people with knowledge of her thinking, it’s one that von der Leyen privately values.

Crisis ideology

It’s perhaps little wonder that von der Leyen’s party feared she didn’t share their outlook. In 2019 the EPP chose Weber for the job; von der Leyen, meanwhile, didn’t even campaign for it, but was parachuted in by the centrist French president at the 11th hour.

More than four years later, von der Leyen remains a taciturn and distant figure. (She declined to comment for this article.) Many of her wins have come from her deft navigation of major and unexpected shocks: the pandemic, the Ukraine war, the energy crisis.

In each of these emergencies, von der Leyen — like other leaders — has used levers of centralized power, pooled resources and public intervention normally unimaginable to Europe’s center right.

As with wars and pandemics, the urgency and immensity of reversing centuries of fossil fuel dominance tends to warp ideology. Timmermans, the social democrat, once told POLITICO he had deep reservations about the unfair impacts of carbon pricing — shortly before massively expanding it to hit fuel for cars and boilers. Von der Leyen, who comes from one of Europe’s great free-market parties, has had to embrace her inner central planner. Adversity, once again, creating strange bedfellows.

This has led some in her party to view her as a double agent. In March, Eric Ciotti, the head of the EPP’s French wing, Les Républicains, explained he wouldn’t back von der Leyen as his party’s candidate for the election because she had “rallied behind the degrowth policies promoted by the left.”

The demands of the green revolution in the coming years promise to break even more conservative taboos.

Those exigencies include a legal obligation to set new climate goals for 2035 and 2040 soon after the next Commission is formed. Also necessary, according to the EU’s official scientific advisory board, will be a tougher approach to farming emissions, public financing to stimulate clean energy investment, an industrial strategy to boost homegrown green technology, and far more generous welfare to cushion the blow to the poorest communities and those most affected by the transition.

These ambitions are hard to reconcile with the EPP election manifesto that von der Leyen has promised to champion. While it unambiguously backs the goals of the Green Deal and some aspects of industrial strategy, the EPP has declared that the EU should no longer pick winners in its fight against climate change; that farmers are to be protected from “top-down approaches;” and, above all, that the market must decide.

Some EPP politicians are still trying to tear down von der Leyen’s enacted policies, including overturning her post-2035 ban on the sale of combustion engine cars.

At a campaign stop in Rome in May, Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, himself an EPP veteran, sat beside von der Leyen. In front of the EPP’s local youth wing, Tajani recited a checklist of her green policies that he found ill-judged and based on “ideology.” Von der Leyen’s face did not move.

The crusade

Once they had established the Commission president as a heretic, Weber and his knights needed a focus for their crusade.

Shortly after the Dutch provincial elections, the Commission obliged by proposing to mandate the restoration of Europe’s degraded land and seascapes.

Farming groups claimed it was a green land grab. The EPP took a stand, and most of its representatives in the Parliament voted against von der Leyen’s landmark nature law.

What followed was a nadir for dialogue in the Parliament and for the normally polite relationships between center-left and center-right MEPs.

The center-left Socialists & Democrats publicly — and baselessly — labeled the entire EPP as climate deniers. The EPP responded with childish and nonsensical tweets about the bearded Timmermans evicting Santa from his home, a contribution to public discourse that three officials admit they now regret.

The Nature Restoration Law, as it is known, had become a fiasco for the EPP. A second party official said the attacks on the party had been motivated by a desire “not to save the planet but to obtain political gain.” It worked: The party became synonymous with a broad anti-green agenda it did not in fact support.

Conservative national leaders were furious with their Brussels counterparts for making the party look out of step with voters who wanted them to act on climate change. A public rebuke for Weber would have been explosive, so leaders brokered a behind-the-scenes compromise that made parts of the nature law voluntary for farmers.

But the peace didn’t hold. When farmers’ tractors began parking on the steps of the European Parliament, the Champs-Élysées and Syntagma Square in Athens at the beginning of 2024, Weber and the EPP reneged on the deal, joining forces with the far right in an attempt to kill it. They failed, but the law remains in limbo.

Dinner and dissent

Throughout all of this, von der Leyen was almost invisible, allowing Timmermans to take all the EPP heat in public.

The Dutchman left the Commission in mid-2023 for an unsuccessful run for prime minister of the Netherlands. Von der Leyen received an EPP colleague, Wopke Hoekstra, as his replacement.

But Samsom was asked to stay on as his chief of staff to prepare a new green proposal, backed by von der Leyen, that would once again stun the EPP.

On Jan. 30, von der Leyen and Hoekstra had dinner in Brussels with Weber and EPP members of the Parliament and the Commission, at which they discussed the Commission’s proposal for an ambitious new EU emissions target for 2040.

The response from those gathered for dinner was one of utter disbelief and rage. Senior MEPs and commissioners demanded to know why von der Leyen would announce a potentially toxic new policy at the very outset of an election campaign. Many had received the draft on or near the day of a massive farmers’ protest that filled Place Luxembourg in front of the European Parliament with smoke from burning tires.

Von der Leyen’s next move looked like an embarrassing retreat. The Commission rewrote the proposal, removing language deemed critical of farmers and a passage on in-house modeling that showed it was possible for agriculture to make large emissions cuts. Von der Leyen also scrapped a separate legal proposal to slash the use of pesticides and watered down green requirements attached to the EU’s main agricultural subsidy program.

At the same time, von der Leyen’s team was defusing another potential area of discontent, quietly delaying the release of a heat pump plan until after the election; Commission officials wanted to avoid a repeat of a far-right campaign in Germany against a law to phase out gas boilers.

The EPP saw the Commission president’s sudden soft-pedaling on green policy as a sign of contrition. When the party met for a preelection congress in Bucharest in early March, von der Leyen was elected unchallenged as their candidate: The apostate had returned to the fold.

Standing beside the Commission president at a Brussels press conference in February, it was time for Weber formally to endorse her. He looked relaxed. Von der Leyen was just finishing a less-than-robust defense of her own ban on combustion engines when Weber cut in — smoothly, politely — to say how happy he was the party would be setting the direction of the bloc’s climate policy in future. “The Green Deal is an EPP deal,” he said.

Win, or avoid, the argument?

These days, in the heat of an election campaign, the two sides insist they’re working seamlessly together.

“What we hear from both within the EPP family and on the campaign trail is this: The climate objectives of the European Green Deal are widely shared and consensual,” said von der Leyen’s chief campaign spokesperson, Alexander Winterstein.

Weber said he and von der Leyen had written the EPP’s manifesto together and laid out a “successful path for an ambitious climate and economic policy for years to come.”

If von der Leyen wins a second term in office after June’s election, however, her current detente with the EPP will be tested immediately.

Von der Leyen’s inner circle regarded her backtracking on green commitments simply as tactical concessions ahead of the European election.

Since the pesticide legislation had already failed to pass the Parliament, they said, von der Leyen was only confirming a political reality. Meanwhile, the 2040 climate target was always one for after the election, and even the heat pump plan is likely to return.

“The goals with regard to climate protection and nature conservation have remained unchanged,” said Commission chief spokesperson Eric Mamer. Consultation with industry and farmers, in particular, led to the Commission’s “proposing actions to ensure proper and simplified implementation of the European Green Deal.”

In April, von der Leyen signaled that her fight with the EPP over the Nature Restoration Law wasn’t over either. In a letter to MEPs, leaked to POLITICO, she defied her party, saying the Commission was “fully committed” to the “flagship proposal.”

If she wins a second term, she’ll be forced to reveal her true intentions early, starting with the selection of a climate chief. Ribera, Spain’s socialist deputy prime minister, is pushing hard for a “super-commissioner” job running all green files: energy, climate and the environment. A life-long climate policy expert, Ribera is widely considered as eminently qualified for the role of climate commissioner, for all that the EPP might recoil at the prospect.

By November, the bloc may also face the question of how to respond to the second presidency of Donald Trump. Everything the EU does in that scenario will need to emphasize its own climate credentials, or risk global green commitments unraveling as American leadership evaporates.

For now, von der Leyen must keep the EPP onside without alienating other major groups to the left that she may need to win a parliamentary confirmation vote after the election. Should the parliament swing heavily to the right, the Commission president hasn’t ruled out working with far-right parties to pass laws — as long as they don’t contravene her own political red lines. Although many far-right parties are hostile to the Green Deal, a belief in the urgency of climate change isn’t among her criteria for collaborating with them.

While there is little doubt the messaging has changed, how far von der Leyen’s true position on climate policy is also shifting is far from clear. She is now on a listening tour with industry and agriculture to try to accommodate their concerns; the aim is to make it easier for polluters to cut emissions.

The president and her team have also quietly reached out to trusted climate campaigners and strategic consultancies asking for views on how to shape and then communicate the second phase of the Green Deal.

To her critics, von der Leyen has made a potentially fatal error in trying to contain the EPP and refine policies to limit any further backlash from farmers and industry.

Ribera, for one, has attacked von der Leyen unsparingly for what she regards as a tepid defense of the Green Deal. “I believe that leadership is required,” Ribera said in an interview with POLITICO. “I believe that she should be encouraged to defend her legacy, and to not undo what she has accomplished during these past five years.”

For now, at least, von der Leyen has an election to win and a job to retain. She speaks of the Green Deal largely in terms of Europe’s industrial competitiveness — a current obsession for the business-friendly EPP.

“It’s okay if we don’t do it only for the climate. If we do it for prosperity, for thriving industries, [for] keeping jobs here and creating new manufacturing jobs in Europe, I’m all up for it,” said one climate policy consultant who has provided advice to the Commission.

In Bucharest in early March, as she accepted her party’s nomination to run in the EU election, von der Leyen addressed EPP delegates as their lead candidate for the first time. The Green Deal figured in her speech, but only as an engine of Europe’s industrial renewal.

“We stand for pragmatic solutions, not ideological ones,” she said. Gone were the lofty ideals of 2019, and the fierce commitment in the years that followed that saw her strongarm her critics into submission. This was no time for a moral crusade.

Leave those to the Knights of the Round Table.

Barbara Moens contributed reporting from Rome and Brussels. Aitor Hernández-Morales and Louise Guillot contributed reporting from Brussels.

CORRECTION: Amends references to compromises on the Nature Restoration Law.