Ursula von der Leyen can run, but can she also hide?

Ursula von der Leyen speaking at the European parliament in Strasbourg, France, 12 March 2024. Photograph: Ronald Wittek/EPA

Ursula von der Leyen became president of the European Commission in a backroom deal in 2019 without facing Europe’s voters. Now she is running for re-election almost without campaigning. The former German defence minister, 65, was chosen unopposed last month as lead candidate of the centre-right European People’s party for the European parliament elections on 6-9 June, although she does not plan to take a seat in the EU legislature. Since then, she has shunned media questioning as far as possible, and is refusing to commit to debating the other candidates in public.

She has not confirmed that she will show up for the high-profile Maastricht debate on 29 April, according to the organisers, and political sources say a major European newspaper had to drop plans to stage its own debate among the Spitzenkandidaten, or lead candidates, because von der Leyen would not pledge to attend.

Frustrated opponents are starting to taunt her as the invisible candidate. “Ursula von der Leyen is claiming to defend European democracy, yet she has refused to run in the European parliament elections, and has failed to clarify whether she will participate in any of the election debates,” Dutch MEP Bas Eickhout, co-lead candidate of the Greens, said last week.

Her coyness is at least partly due to a political cronyism scandal that is dogging her path to a second coronation. Von der Leyen is avoiding questioning about her decision to appoint fellow German Christian Democrat MEP Markus Pieper as the EU commission’s first envoy for small and medium-sized enterprises, even though he was reportedly rated below two female contenders for the highly paid role by an independent selection committee.

In a non-binding amendment adopted by 382 votes to 144, the European parliament called last week for the controversial appointment, first revealed in February by two investigative journalists, to be rescinded and the contest run again. Lawmakers questioned whether the principles of “merit, gender balance and geographical balance” had been taken into consideration. That followed a letter to von der Leyen by four commissioners from rival parties challenging the “transparency and impartiality” of the selection process.

After the commission spokesperson had insisted all the rules had been respected and there was no intention to revise the decision, Pieper resigned on Monday hours before he was due to take up the €17,000-a-month job. Of course he blamed the French internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, one of the four critics, for making life miserable for small business. While his departure was an attempt to draw a line under the affair, von der Leyen is bound to face nagging questions about the apparent favouritism as soon as she appears in public.

As political scandals or banana skins go, “Piepergate” ranks as a pretty small tremor on the Richter scale. Media attempts to skewer von der Leyen over exchanges of text messages with the CEO of pharma giant Pfizer at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the EU scrambled to procure huge quantities of vaccines, have stumbled over her failure to disclose the contents.

But those nagging issues are not the only reason that von der Leyen has been mostly in hiding since officially launching her campaign earlier in the month in Athens. As the first sitting head of the EU executive to seek a second term since Jose Manuel Barroso in 2009, she may well feel she can afford to skip the hustings until the last minute. Especially as the pro-European EPP is leading comfortably in all pan-European opinion polls, despite a surge in support for the far right.

Her campaign team under chief-of-staff Björn Seibert, on temporary leave from the commission, only started work in the second week of April. Her communications and social media team are just beginning. All indicators point to a minimalist campaign around the themes of preserving security and prosperity from populists and extremists on both sides, with von der Leyen depicted as the steady hand on Europe’s tiller in heavy geopolitical seas.

The cynical, no-brainer campaign strategy is to max out on the advantages of incumbency and ignore your rivals rather than giving them the boost of debating with the boss. Why show up to be attacked by angry Eurosceptics, pesky greens or bolshie leftists before small television and online audiences when you can rack up photo opportunities discussing Iran’s missile attack on Israel with world leaders, or cutting ribbons on EU-funded infrastructure projects?

“She’s a good debater but frankly, why take the risk?” an EPP insider said. “ Let them hit you with the fact that you didn’t do it, but don’t do it because you’d only be debating people who are not real contenders for the job.”

The loudest objections to von der Leyen’s invisibility approach are the pro-European Greens and liberal centrists who are projected to lose the most seats and are desperate for the oxygen of publicity from the debates. They are correct about the democratic principle that elections are a time to thrash out policy differences and confront ideas.

But European parliament elections are a strange beast. They are more like 27 national elections in which many of those who bother to vote see a no-cost opportunity to give their governments a kicking. The issues in Poland are not the same as in Spain or in the Netherlands.

Despite efforts over decades to create a single European electorate with pan-European political parties, pan-European lead candidates and pan-European television debates, this election will be only tangentially about EU issues such as building common defences, reforming common fiscal rules, the EU’s new common migration policy or even the joint fight against the climate crisis.

That’s another reason why there is little upside for von der Leyen in taking part in much public debate. It isn’t really the electorate that will decide whether she gets a second term. It’s the 27 national leaders who will tussle over the distribution of top EU jobs after the election, and the party machines in the European parliament that will wrestle over endorsing or rejecting her, based on their own interests.

Running a stealth campaign may be von der Leyen’s best chance of avoiding offending any of the big beasts of the European jungle who will determine her fate. It’s a shame for democracy. If she runs, she shouldn’t hide. But until she shows up beaming and regal for the final television debate, she’s likely to remain mostly out of sight, to the immense frustration of her rivals and the media.

Paul Taylor is a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank