Ursula von der Leyen: The Physician Who Runs Brussels
Ursula von der Leyen has spent her career being the first woman in rooms built for men: first female German defense minister, first female president of the European Commission. She got there by a route almost nobody in Brussels shares — seven children, a medical degree, and a surname, Albrecht, that once belonged to the premier of Lower Saxony.
From Medicine to the Bundestag
Born in Brussels in 1958, the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, a senior European Commission official who later became Lower Saxony's state premier, von der Leyen grew up inside the European project before she ever worked for it. She studied economics in London and trained as a physician, practicing medicine in California and then for five years in Hanover, and met her husband, Heiko von der Leyen, while a student. She joined Germany's Christian Democratic Union in 1990 and spent the 1990s largely as a mother of seven before entering elected politics in earnest in 2003, when she became Lower Saxony's minister for social affairs, women, family and health.
Merkel's Cabinet Fixture
Angela Merkel made her a fixture of German government for a decade and a half. Von der Leyen served as federal minister for family affairs from 2005, for labor and social affairs from 2009, and then, from 2013, as Germany's defense minister — the first woman to hold that post. The defense ministry years were rocky: she was criticized over the Bundeswehr's chronic equipment failures and an expensive external-consultants scandal that drew a parliamentary inquiry. It was, by most German accounts, the least successful stretch of an otherwise steadily rising career.
President of the Commission
In 2019, with Merkel's succession plans in disarray, EU leaders picked von der Leyen — a compromise candidate few had expected — as president of the European Commission, the EU's powerful executive arm. She became the first woman to hold the post and immediately set an agenda built around the European Green Deal, a program to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050. She then had to govern through emergencies nobody had planned for: the coronavirus pandemic, which the Commission answered with a joint EU vaccine-procurement scheme and a €750 billion recovery fund, and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which pushed her into the position of coordinating sanctions packages and military and financial aid to Kyiv alongside NATO capitals. In 2024 EU leaders and the European Parliament reelected her to a second five-year term, and on taking it she described her first term as having "sailed through the most troubled waters our Union has ever faced."
Pfizergate
Her handling of the pandemic vaccine deals produced the defining controversy of her presidency. In 2021 the New York Times reported that von der Leyen had exchanged personal text messages with Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla while negotiating a contract worth up to €35 billion for hundreds of millions of vaccine doses — then the Commission refused to release the texts, saying it did not have to keep messages that were not registered documents. The dispute, dubbed "Pfizergate," went to the EU's General Court, which ruled in May 2025 that the Commission had violated the bloc's transparency law by failing to properly justify withholding the messages or explain why it had not preserved or logged them. The episode has become the standard case study, cited by transparency advocates and journalists across Europe, for how much discretion the Commission's president can exercise beyond any formal paper trail — and how reluctant her Commission has been to give that discretion up.
Style of Power
Colleagues and critics converge on a similar description of how she runs the Commission: centralized, fast-moving, and personally controlling of the message, in a way that has drawn accusations — from MEPs, from national governments, and from her own commissioners at times — that she has concentrated power in her own cabinet at the expense of collective decision-making. Supporters counter that this same instinct for speed is what let the EU act quickly on vaccines, sanctions and Ukraine aid when consensus-building among 27 states would otherwise have taken months. Forbes has twice named her the world's most powerful woman.
Why Ursula Is Called a Genius
The word "genius" sits awkwardly on von der Leyen, and almost nobody who covers Brussels uses it for her, including the sources reviewed here. What she is more consistently credited with — by profiles in the German and European press — is something narrower: an unusual capacity to hold enormous, fast-moving crises (a pandemic, a war, a climate transition) in her head at once and force a fragmented 27-country bureaucracy to move on all of them simultaneously, often by concentrating decisions in her own office rather than waiting for consensus. That is a real and rare administrative talent, closer to political and organizational shrewdness than to intellectual originality — she has not authored a doctrine or theory that bears her name. The honest counter-case is substantial: the defense ministry years exposed real management failures, Pfizergate suggests that same centralizing instinct shading into a lack of accountability, and a court has now formally found her Commission broke transparency law. Calling her a genius flatters a skill set that is better described as elite political management under pressure, not far-seeing brilliance.
Legacy in Progress
Von der Leyen's Commission has already reshaped how the EU behaves in a crisis — jointly procuring vaccines, jointly borrowing for recovery funds, jointly arming Ukraine — steps that would have been unthinkable in Brussels a decade earlier. As president, she also holds formal authority to decide how the Commission is organized and how policy portfolios are distributed among commissioners, giving her more structural control over the EU executive than most of her predecessors exercised, and she represents the Union at G7 and G20 summits and in dealings with Washington, Beijing and Kyiv. Her second term, which runs to 2029, opened under the shadow of the Pfizergate ruling and amid growing friction with a European Parliament increasingly willing to challenge her cabinet's grip on decision-making. Whether history remembers her chiefly for the institutional innovation of her first term or for the opacity that came with it will depend on how cases like Pfizergate, and the coalition politics of her second mandate, play out in the years ahead.
Achievements
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order for Merits to Lithuania
- Affiliated with Hannover Medical School and Hannover Medical School
- Educated at Hannover Medical School, University of Göttingen and Leibniz University Hannover
- Worked as physician, politician and equestrian
