Ursula von der Leyen secured a second term at the helm of the European Commission Thursday, propelled to victory in part by the last-minute backing of the Greens.
Out of 707 votes cast, 401 members of the European Parliament voted to give Von der Leyen another five years as president of the EU’s executive arm – 41 more than she needed to secure the post. Twenty-two votes were left blank or were marked as invalid.
Von der Leyen received support from a centrist coalition comprised of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) group from which she hails, the centre-left Socialists & Democrats (S&D) group and the liberal Renew Europe group. But a surprisingly robust last-minute show of support from the Greens/EFA group proved crucial to her garnering a solid majority.
The Greens, which hold 53 seats in the EP, had announced earlier Thursday that they would back Von der Leyen to “keep the far right out of power.”
“The Greens were the kingmaker in this election,” Sophia Russack, a researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), told The Parliament.
“It looks like at least 45 votes came from the Greens. If the party leadership had said we would vote against it, then it would have been very close,” she added.
Federico Castiglioni, an EU researcher at the Rome-based think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali, agreed that the Greens played a pivotal role in deciding the outcome. “The numbers show the election of Von der Leyen would have been impossible” without the Greens, he said. The group did not back her in 2019.
The Greens were the kingmaker in this election.
But the Greens asked for few, if any, concessions for their votes – other than a commitment from Von der Leyen to abide by the tenants of the European Green Deal, including reaching climate-neutrality by 2050. “This is the attitude that helped Von der Leyen find the balance between them and the EPP,” Castiglioni argued.
Moreover, according to Russack, the Greens were concerned with presenting their members as “statesmanlike” and the group as a compromising coalition partner.
“Greens are becoming part of the majority coalition in Brussels. This is an enormous opportunity that we would have missed today by saying no to Von der Leyen. In my eyes, that would have been irresponsible,” Daniel Freund, a frequent critic of the Commission president, told The Parliament after the election.
Von der Leyen explicitly thanked the Greens in comments to reporters following the vote. “We had intensive exchanges on all topics and it’s a good sign that at the very end, obviously, they were convinced to support me,” she said.
Ahead of the secret ballot, Von der Leyen outlined her policy agenda for the next mandate in a speech to the EP, calling for further integration of the single market, a commitment to climate targets enshrined in the Green Deal, and the development of a coordinated industrial policy to ensure the EU’s energy independence. “Together, we will ensure that the area of dependency from Russian fossil fuels is over, once and for all,” she said.
Von der Leyen was first elected to the European Commission in 2019 after the European Council declined to back EPP lead candidate Manfred Weber and instead nominated the former German defence minister – even though she was not officially running for the EU’s top job. That year, 383 MEPs backed Von der Leyen, just nine more than she needed to win.
This time around, Von der Leyen was the EPP’s lead candidate for the post and ran a full campaign across Europe – a move that likely increased her legitimacy, according to Francesco Nicoli, a political scientist and visiting fellow at the Bruegel think tank.