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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s track record as a politician is marred by a number of serious accusations.
In 2024, she generated controversy by appointing Germany’s Markus Pieper – member of the same German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party as her – to the lucrative position of EU Envoy for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME).
Pieper’s CDU membership, along with claims that two other candidates short-listed for the SME envoy office scored higher than him during the selection process, led to von der Leyen being accused of favoritism.
France’s European Commissioner Thierry Breton even resigned in September over this row, citing von der Leyen’s “questionable governance.”
During the COVID pandemic, von der Leyen made a deal with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to purchase 1.8 billion doses of then-untested COVID vaccines worth about $37.6 billion.
Von der Leyen negotiated this deal via a series of text messages that she ended up deleting – ostensibly by accident – along with those she exchanged with her husband Heiko, medical director at a biotech firm with ties to Pfizer.
As a result, von der Leyen was accused of corruption and “usurpation of functions and title,” and is currently being sued in Liege by Belgian lobbyist Frederic Baldan.
‘Consultancy Firms Affair’
At the end of her 2013-2019 tenure as Germany’s minister of defense, von der Leyen became the target of a probe by the Federal Audit Office over her practice of awarding lucrative contracts to external consultancy firms.
In its 2018 report, the Federal Audit Office cast doubt on the procedures for awarding some of these contracts worth MILLIONS of euros, which was apparently done without a proper assessment of the costs or a proper competition.
One such consultancy firm, the US-based McKinsey, attracted attention after the head of its Berlin office Katrin Suder was hired as von der Leyen’s aide. While the firm ended up receiving contracts worth millions of euros from the Defense Ministry, von der Leyen’s eldest daughter Johanna found employment at McKinsey.
Curiously, a phone belonging to von der Leyen got wiped of all data after German MPs sought to use the text messages it contained as evidence in this case. The German Ministry of Defense said at the time that this wipe was done «for security reasons.»
