Ursula von der Leyen

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ursula von der Leyen, who would later lead the European Commission, spent more than a year of her youth hiding in London under the name Rose Ladson. In 1978 her family was warned that the Red Army Faction, a West German terrorist group, planned to kidnap her. The reason was simple. Her father was a prominent politician. She fled to London, lived under protection from Scotland Yard, and enrolled at the London School of Economics. The alias was stitched together from two pieces of her own past. Röschen, a German diminutive of Rose, had been her childhood nickname. Ladson was the surname of her American great-grandmother's family. Years later she remembered the city with affection. She said she lived more than she studied. London was, in her words, "the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything". It gave her "an inner freedom that I have kept till today". Few future heads of an international institution begin adult life as a fugitive with a borrowed name. This documentary asks how a physician raised between Brussels and Hanover became a fixture of Angela Merkel's cabinet. It asks what her years in government cost her at home, and why her record there still trails her. It also asks what she did with the power of the Commission once she held it.

  1823172613

• 2. Brussels, Medicine and Family

  ›

  Ixelles, a district of Brussels, is where Ursula Albrecht was born in 1958. She stayed in Belgium until she was 13. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the first European civil servants, and she grew up speaking both German and French. In 1971 the family moved to Sehnde, near Hanover, after her father became chief executive of the food company Bahlsen and entered state politics. By 1976 he was minister-president of Lower Saxony. She began studying economics at the University of Göttingen in 1977. After returning from London in 1979 she lived for several years with a security detail at her side. In 1980 she abandoned economics for medicine, specialising in gynaecology at the Hannover Medical School. From 1988 to 1992 she worked there as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic. She earned her doctorate in medicine in 1991. Family life ran alongside the training. In 1986 she married Heiko von der Leyen, a fellow physician from a family of nobility that had made its fortune in silk. They have seven children, born between 1987 and 1999. After the birth of twins she spent the years from 1992 to 1996 in Stanford, California, where her husband was a faculty member. Back in Hanover she taught epidemiology and social medicine from 1998 to 2002, and in 2001 she completed a Master of Public Health. The family lives on a farm in Burgdorf, near Hanover, where they keep horses, and she has competed as a rider. Her party membership had started quietly in 1990, but she only became active in local politics in 1996, soon after coming home from California.

  1115162731

• 3. Reformer in Merkel's Cabinet

  ›

  In 2003, Angela Merkel, then leading the opposition, asked von der Leyen to help draft alternatives to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's welfare overhaul, known as Agenda 2010. The group was named the Herzog Commission after its chairman, the former German president Roman Herzog. Among its ideas was separating health and nursing-care premiums from income and charging a flat monthly sum instead. That same year voters in Lehrte, a constituency Schröder himself had represented from 1986 to 1998, sent her to the Lower Saxony parliament. She served until 2005 as a state minister under Christian Wulff, covering social affairs, women, family and health. Merkel then named her to the shadow cabinet on family and social security. When Merkel became chancellor in 2005, von der Leyen became federal minister for family affairs and youth. Her Child Advancement Act set aside 4.3 billion euros for childcare facilities across Germany. She also introduced paid parental leave, with two extra months reserved for fathers who take it. Conservatives pushed back hard. Catholic Bishop Walter Mixa accused her of turning women into "birthing machines". Bavarian allies complained that men did not need a "diaper-changing internship". She answered with a public relations campaign costing 3 million euros, which critics said misused public money. On the 30th of November 2009 she moved to the labour and social affairs ministry. There she pressed for more nurseries, a quota for women on company boards, gay marriage and a nationwide minimum wage. That earned her enemies among traditionalists and admirers on the left. She also lobbied to ease immigration for skilled workers. In 2013 she signed an agreement with the Philippines to help Filipino health professionals find work in Germany on the same terms as German staff. Her ambitions had limits. In 2010 she was the front-runner to be the conservative candidate for president of Germany, but the party's more conservative state premiers blocked her. Christian Wulff got the nomination instead. In 2013 her campaign for a statutory board quota, 20% women by 2018 rising to 40% by 2023, also failed.

  4344475354

• 4. Rebuilding the Bundeswehr

  ›

  In 2014, only 42 of Germany's 109 Eurofighter Typhoons and 38 of its 89 Tornado fighters were ready for deployment. Von der Leyen had run the defence ministry for barely a year. She had been appointed in December 2013 as Germany's first female defence minister, and Merkel hoped a figure of her weight would lift a scandal-ridden ministry. An external report found all nine of the army's major projects badly late, with delays ranging from 30 to 360 months and overruns in the billions of euros. She admitted that Germany could not currently meet NATO requirements. Her first move was modest. In June 2014 she introduced a 100 million euro package to attract recruits, including crèches for soldiers' children, postings that fit school terms, and bigger hardship allowances. Money followed as tensions with Russia rose. In May 2015 the government agreed to raise defence spending, then 1.3% of GDP, by 6.2% over five years. The plan called for a tank fleet of up to 328 and 131 more Boxer armoured carriers. In May 2016 she promised 130 billion euros of new equipment by 2030 and nearly 7,000 more soldiers by 2023. In February 2017 she set a target of growing the professional force from 178,000 to 198,000 by 2024. Suppliers felt the pressure. In January 2015 she told Airbus it had a serious quality problem with its A400M transport plane, and the ministry accepted 13 million euros in compensation for late deliveries. Abroad, her ministry faced a sequence of crises. She visited troops in Afghanistan three times in her first year. In September 2015, after the Taliban seized Kunduz, she signalled openness to delaying the withdrawal of 850 German soldiers. In summer 2014 she helped drive the decision to supply Kurdish Peshmerga fighters with lethal aid. In February 2015 at the Munich Security Conference she defended Germany's refusal to arm Ukraine. Weapons deliveries, she told a newspaper, would be "a fire accelerant". In early 2016 parliament approved sending up to 650 soldiers to Mali. A hacker also cloned her fingerprint in December 2014, using only photographs. Her toughest internal decision came in April 2017. After officials failed to investigate reports of hazing and sexual humiliation in training, she fired the army's training commander, Major General Walter Spindler.

  7881868889

• 5. Scandals and Nicknames

  ›

  "Zensursula" was the nickname Germans gave her after she backed a mandatory block on child pornography websites. The plan used a list maintained by the Federal Criminal Police Office. Critics saw the groundwork for wider censorship, and the fight is said to have boosted interest in the Pirate Party. In July 2009 she argued that offenders use servers in Africa or India, where such material was supposedly legal. The claim rested on a 2006 study. India in fact bans it, with stricter rules than Germany, and she later regretted citing the study. A different kind of attack arrived in 2015. Researchers at the VroniPlag Wiki examined her 1991 medical dissertation and alleged that 43.5% of its pages contained plagiarism. They also found 23 cases of citations that did not support the claims attached to them. Academics including Gerhard Dannemann and Volker Rieble publicly accused her of intentional plagiarism. In March 2016 the Hannover Medical School concluded that the thesis did contain plagiarism, but that intent to deceive could not be proven. It kept her degree. Critics noted that she knew the investigating panel's director from an alumni association, and media outlets called the process opaque. A third affair followed her out of the ministry. Since 2018, auditors and an investigative committee have examined how contracts worth tens of millions of euros went to outside consultants. Irregularities were found. Two of her phones were confiscated, but data on both had been deleted before they were returned to the ministry. Opposition lawmaker Tobias Lindner filed a criminal complaint, suspecting deliberate destruction of evidence. In December 2019, parliamentarians accused the ministry of undermining the inquiry by wiping her official phone, which officials explained as a security measure.

  3334366560

• 6. The Road to Brussels

  ›

  "A star presence" was how British defence secretary Michael Fallon described her in 2019, adding that she had been "the doyenne of NATO ministers for over five years". The German newspaper Die Welt reported that all the NATO defence ministers listen when she speaks. From 2018 she was seen as the favourite to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary general. Many also saw her as a possible successor to Merkel. Instead, on the 2nd of July 2019, the European Council proposed her as candidate for president of the European Commission. On the 16th of July, the European Parliament approved her by 383 votes to 327. Germany abstained in the Council, reportedly because she was considered divisive at home. She became the first woman in the post and the first German since the Commission's first president, Walter Hallstein. A private loss shaped one of her priorities. As a girl in Brussels she lost her little sister, Benita-Eva, to cancer at the age of eleven, and remembered her parents' helplessness. That memory led her to make cancer a focus of her Commission. She resigned from the Bundestag on the 31st of July 2019. On the 10th of September she unveiled a team she called geopolitical, with renamed portfolios meant to sound more goal-oriented. One title drew heavy criticism, "Protecting our European Way of Life", a vice-presidency covering migration, security, employment and education. Critics said it linked European identity to hostility toward migrants. She also promoted Valdis Dombrovskis to executive vice-president, alongside Frans Timmermans and Margrethe Vestager. Her campaign for the job included support for letting parliamentarians propose legislation, a position she dropped soon after taking office. She also backed the trade deal with the Mercosur countries, though critics feared more Amazon deforestation from Brazilian beef exports. Her term began on the 1st of December 2019, and within months a pandemic put her Commission to the test.

  3456428

• 7. Crisis Management

  ›

  In March 2020, with Italy at the centre of Europe's COVID-19 outbreak, her Commission rejected suspending the Schengen Agreement to put border controls around that country. She argued that general travel bans disrupt lives and business across borders and are not seen as effective by the World Health Organization. Vaccines then became her defining test. Pfizer secured a deal worth 35 billion euros for 900 million doses, with 900 million more available. It was initially well received. A later low estimate cited by Politico said over 100 million doses, worth about 4 billion euros, were discarded. Trouble over her private messages with Pfizer's chief executive, Albert Bourla, came in April 2021 when The New York Times reported on their correspondence. Emily O'Reilly, the European Ombudsman, accused the Commission of maladministration for failing to release those messages. Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides told the European Parliament that von der Leyen had no formal role in the negotiations. The affair, nicknamed "Pfizergate", reached the European Public Prosecutor's Office in 2024. Energy came next. Prices surged across Europe in 2021, and some critics blamed the Green Deal, which aims for climate neutrality by 2050. Her answer was that Europe relied too heavily on imported gas. On the 8th of April 2022 she travelled to Kyiv, only days after fighting there, and visited Bucha. Her message to Ukraine was, "Your fight is our fight." On the 4th of May she announced a plan to ban all Russian crude oil and petroleum imports. That July she called Azerbaijan a reliable energy partner and signed a gas supply agreement. Azerbaijan attacked Armenia a few months later, and activists said the EU could not condemn one dictator while embracing another. In May 2023, at the Beyond Growth conference, she declared that "economic growth is not an end in itself". An hour later, the Commission published a forecast that discussed only GDP and inflation. In September 2023, more than 120 boats carrying around 7,000 migrants reached Lampedusa within 24 hours. Prime minister Giorgia Meloni wrote to ask her to come and see the scale of the problem.

  678910

• 8. A Second Term

  ›

  On the 7th of March 2024, the European People's Party chose her as its lead candidate for the European Parliament elections. The Parliament re-elected her on the 18th of July 2024, with 401 votes in favour, 284 against and 22 blank or invalid. That was an absolute majority of 720 members, about thirty votes stronger than in 2019. Her second Commission moved fast. On the 26th of February 2025 it announced the Clean Industrial Deal, backed by 100 billion euros to support clean manufacturing in the EU. On the 4th of March she unveiled ReArm Europe, an 800 billion euro defence investment plan, and suggested loosening fiscal rules on national debt to help pay for it. In July 2025 she survived a no-confidence vote, with 360 members against and 175 in favour. That month in Beijing, she pointed to the EU's 305.8 billion euro trade deficit with China and pressed Beijing over its rare earth export controls and its ties with Russia. On the 27th of July she and Donald Trump announced a customs agreement setting 15% tariffs on European exports. Forbes named her the world's most powerful woman in 2022, 2023-2024 and 2025. Trade deals filled the start of 2026. On the 17th of January, in Asunción, Paraguay, she and the Mercosur leaders signed an agreement that ended more than 25 years of negotiation. Also in January, an India-EU trade agreement concluded after 18 years, aiming to remove tariffs on over 90% of goods. A visit to Damascus on the 9th of January brought a pledge of about 620 million euros for Syria across 2026 and 2027. On the 10th of March 2026, at a nuclear energy summit in Paris, she called Europe's cutback in nuclear power a strategic mistake, pointing to a dependence on imported fossil fuels that left the continent exposed to price surges during the Iran war.

  789106