Party roles

Deputy Leader of the Christian Democratic Union
In office 15 November 2010 – 22 November 2019 Serving with Volker Bouffier, Julia Klöckner, Armin Laschet, Thomas Strobl
Leader	Angela Merkel Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer
Preceded by	Christian Wulff
Succeeded by	Silvia Breher

Lower Saxony Cabinet

Minister of Social Affairs, Women and Families and Health
In office 4 March 2003 – 22 November 2005
Minister-President	Christian Wulff
Preceded by	Gitta Trauernicht
Succeeded by	Mechthild Ross-Luttmann

Parliamentary constituencies

Member of the Bundestag for Lower Saxony
In office 27 October 2009 – 31 July 2019
Preceded by	multi-member district
Succeeded by	Ingrid Pahlmann
Constituency	Christian Democratic Union List
Member of the Landtag of Lower Saxony for Lehrte
In office 4 March 2003 – 7 December 2005
Preceded by	Gerhard Schröder (1998)
Succeeded by	Dorothee Prüssner

Personal details

Born

Ursula Gertrud Albrecht

8 October 1958 (age 66)
Ixelles, Belgium

Nationality

German

Political party

Christian Democratic Union (since 1990)

Other political
affiliations

European People's Party

Spouses

Heiko von der Leyen

(m. 1986)

Children

Parent

Ernst Albrecht (father)

Relatives

Hans-Holger Albrecht (brother)
Carl Albrecht
(grandfather)

Alma mater

University of Göttingen
University of Münster
London School of Economics
Hannover Medical School (MD, MPH)

Occupation

Politician
Physician
Research fellow

Signature

Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen ( née Albrecht; born 8 October 1958) is a German politician, serving as the 13th president of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as federal minister of defence. Von der Leyen is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its affiliated europarty, the European People's Party (EPP). On 7 March 2024, the EPP elected her as its Spitzenkandidat to lead the campaign for the 2024 European parliament elections. She was re-elected to head the Commission in July 2024.

Family and early life
Education and professional career
Political career
Political views
Honours
Images for kids
See also

Family and early life

Von der Leyen's family coat of arms

Von der Leyen was born in 1958 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, where she lived until she was 13 years old. In the family, she has been known since childhood as Röschen, a diminutive of Rose. Her father Ernst Albrecht worked as one of the first European civil servants from the establishment of the European Commission in 1958, first as chef de cabinet to the European commissioner for competition Hans von der Groeben in the Hallstein Commission, and then as director-general of the Directorate-General for Competition from 1967 to 1970. She attended the European School, Brussels I until the age of 13.

In 1971, she relocated to Sehnde in the Hanover region after her father had become CEO of the food company Bahlsen and involved in state politics in Lower Saxony. Her father served as Minister President of Lower Saxony (state prime minister) from 1976 to 1990, being re-elected in state parliament elections in 1978, 1982 and 1986. In 1980 he ran for the CDU nomination for the German chancellorship, backed by CDU chairman Helmut Kohl, but narrowly missed the candidacy to fellow conservative Franz Josef Strauß (who then lost the general election to the sitting chancellor Helmut Schmidt); in the 1990 state elections Ernst Albrecht lost his office to Gerhard Schröder, who later became German chancellor.

Most of her ancestors were from the former states of Hanover and Bremen in today's northwestern Germany; she has one American great-grandmother of primarily British descent, with more distant French and Italian ancestors, and some ancestors from what is now Estonia, then part of former Russian Empire. The Albrecht family was among the hübsche ("courtly" or "genteel") families of the Electorate and Kingdom of Hanover—a state that was in a personal union with the United Kingdom—and her ancestors had been doctors, jurists and civil servants since the 17th century. Her great-great-grandfather George Alexander Albrecht moved to Bremen in the 19th century, where he became a wealthy cotton merchant, part of the Hanseatic elite and the Austro-Hungarian Consul from 1895. He married Baroness Louise Dorothea Betty von Knoop (1844–1889), a daughter of Baron Johann Ludwig von Knoop, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 19th century Russian Empire.

Von der Leyen's father's grandparents were the cotton merchant Carl Albrecht (1875–1952) and Mary Ladson Robertson (1883–1960), an American who descended from a planter family in Charleston, South Carolina. Her American ancestors played a significant role in the British colonisation of the Americas, and she descends from many of the first English settlers of Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Barbados, and from numerous colonial governors. Among her ancestors were Carolina governors John Yeamans, James Moore, Robert Gibbes, Thomas Smith and Joseph Blake, Pennsylvania deputy governor Samuel Carpenter, and the American revolutionary and lieutenant governor of South Carolina James Ladson. The Ladson family were large plantation owners and her ancestor James H. Ladson held over 200 people enslaved by the time slavery in the United States was abolished; her relatives and ancestors were among the wealthiest in British North America in the 18th century, and she descends from one of the largest slave traders in the Thirteen Colonies, Joseph Wragg. Carl and Mary were the parents of Ursula von der Leyen's grandfather, the psychologist Carl Albrecht, who was known for developing a new method of meditation and for his research on mystical consciousness. She is the niece of the conductor George Alexander Albrecht and a first cousin of the chief conductor of the Dutch National Opera Marc Albrecht. Contrary to persistent internet rumours, the Albrecht family is not related to the owners of the supermarket chain Aldi.

In 1986, she married physician Heiko von der Leyen, a member of the von der Leyen family that made a fortune as silk merchants and was ennobled in 1786; her husband became a professor of medicine and the CEO of a medical engineering company. She met him at a university choir in Göttingen. They have seven children, born between 1987 and 1999. Von der Leyen is Lutheran.

Ursula von der Leyen is a native speaker of German and French, and speaks English fluently, having lived for a combined five years in the United Kingdom and the United States. She lives with her family on a farm in Burgdorf near Hanover where they keep horses. She is a keen equestrian and has been involved in competitive horseriding.

Education and professional career

She moved to the Hanover Region in 1971 when her father entered politics to become minister-president of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. In 1977, she started studying economics at the University of Göttingen. At the height of the fear of communist terrorism in West Germany, she fled to London in 1978 after her family was told that the Red Army Faction (RAF) was planning to kidnap her due to her being the daughter of a prominent politician. She spent more than a year in hiding in London, where she lived with protection from Scotland Yard under the name Rose Ladson to avoid detection and enrolled at the London School of Economics. A German diminutive of Rose, Röschen, had been her nickname since childhood, while Ladson was the name of her American great-grandmother's family, originally from Northamptonshire. She said that she "lived more than she studied", and that London was "the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything" which "gave me an inner freedom that I have kept till today". She returned to Germany in 1979 but lived with a security detail at her side for several years.

In 1980, she switched to studying medicine and enrolled at the Hannover Medical School, where she graduated in 1987 and acquired her medical licence, specialising in women's health. From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she defended the thesis and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University, returning to Germany in 1996.

From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hannover Medical School. In 2001 she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.

Political career

Ursula von der Leyen joined the CDU in 1990, and became active in local politics in Lower Saxony in 1996, shortly after she had returned to Germany after living in California. She served as a cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2005.

In 2005, Ursula von der Leyen joined the federal cabinet, first as minister of family affairs and youth from 2005 to 2009, then as minister of labour and social affairs from 2009 to 2013, and finally as minister of defence from 2013 to 2019, the first woman to serve as German defence minister. When she left office she was the only minister to have served continuously in Merkel's cabinet since Merkel became chancellor. She served as a deputy leader of the CDU from 2010 to 2019, and was regarded as a leading contender to succeed Merkel as chancellor of Germany and as the favourite to become secretary general of NATO after Jens Stoltenberg.

On 2 July 2019, von der Leyen was proposed by the European Council as the candidate for president of the European Commission. She was then elected by the European Parliament on 16 July; she took office on 1 December, becoming the first woman to hold the office. She was named the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2022 and 2023.

Political views

Childcare and parental leave

Ursula von der Leyen assumed her office as Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in 2005. Amidst protest (particularly from the conservative wing of the CDU), she introduced the Child Advancement Act [de] (Kinderförderungsgesetz), which reserved 4.3 billion euros for the creation of childcare structures throughout Germany.

Von der Leyen also introduced the German Elternzeit, a paid parental leave scheme. Following Scandinavian models, the scheme reserves two additional months for fathers who go on parental leave as well (Vätermonate in German). This part of the law, in particular, attracted protest from some German conservatives. Catholic Bishop Walter Mixa accused von der Leyen of turning women into "birthing machines". Meanwhile, Bavarian colleagues from von der Leyen's sister party, the CSU, complained that men did not need a "diaper-changing internship". von der Leyen successfully influenced public opinion of her reforms with a 3-million-euro PR campaign, which was criticised for using public funds for political advocacy and for employing embedded marketing techniques.

Women board quota

In 2013, von der Leyen unsuccessfully campaigned for a statutory quota for female participation in the supervisory boards of companies in Germany, requiring company boards to be at least 20% female by 2018, rising to 40% by 2023.

German foreign policy

Von der Leyen with U.S. President Donald Trump in January 2020

Von der Leyen is a proponent of a more assertive German foreign policy. One striking example was the decision in September 2014 to send arms to Kurdish and Iraqi security forces. This decision broke a longstanding taboo on Germany's dispatching of weapons to a conflict zone.

Von der Leyen and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the International Conference on Libya, 19 January 2020

Von der Leyen and Henry Kissinger at the Munich Security Conference in 2014

Von der Leyen has supported close security cooperation with Saudi Arabia. German opposition parties criticised Germany's defence plan with Saudi Arabia, which has been waging war in Yemen and was condemned for massive human rights violations.

In 2017 von der Leyen noted that "healthy democratic resistance of the younger generation" in Poland must be supported. In some Polish media, it was understood that she instigated opposition aimed to overthrow the allegedly anti-democratic and authoritarian PiS government; the statement was branded as scandalous. The Polish Foreign Minister made sarcastic comments about "Prussian tone of the Ode to Joy". The Polish Minister of Defence summoned the Germany military attache and demanded explanations. The German embassy in Warsaw and spokesman for the German defence ministry in Berlin issued conciliatory statements. The German media mostly ignored the incident; some acknowledged a "minor slip of the tongue" on the part of von der Leyen, yet also noted that German-Polish relations were "severely damaged".

European integration

Manfred Weber, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and von der Leyen in April 2019

In a 2011 interview with Der Spiegel, von der Leyen expressed her preference for "a united states of Europe—run along the lines of the federal states of Switzerland, Germany or the USA" which would capitalise on Europe's size by agreeing on core issues relating to finance, tax and economic politics.

With 2014 marking the centenary of the start of World War I, von der Leyen—in her capacity as defence minister—inaugurated a memorial for the Armistice Day in Ablain-Saint-Nazaire alongside French President François Hollande and North Rhine-Westphalia State Premier Hannelore Kraft, as well as British and Belgian officials.

In 2015, von der Leyen argued that a form of EU army should be a long-term goal. She also said that she was convinced about the goal of a combined military force, just as she was convinced that "perhaps not my children, but then my grandchildren will experience a United States of Europe". In March 2015, she and her counterparts from France and Poland, Jean-Yves Le Drian and Tomasz Siemoniak, revived a meeting format intended to promote cooperation between the three countries in crisis zones by holding their first meeting between the Weimar Triangle defence ministers since 2007.

Von der Leyen with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, 3 November 2022

Following the 2016 European Union membership referendum in the United Kingdom, she argued that the UK had "paralysed" European efforts to integrate security policy and "consistently blocked everything with the label 'Europe' on it". She has described Brexit as "a burst bubble of hollow promises". In an interview with The Guardian days after her election to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission, she stated that the withdrawal deal agreed between Theresa May and chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier would remain the basis of any future talks. She also stated that the EU should extend the Brexit deadline beyond 31 October 2019. In November 2019, at Paris Peace Forum, von der Leyen said that there is need for stable and responsible leadership in Europe and that the bloc must increase foreign policy budget spending by one-third.

Environment

Ursula von der Leyen considers stopping climate change as a top priority. She is promoting green regulation and initiatives.

She promoted the European Green Deal. She complained that "Global markets are now flooded with cheaper Chinese electric cars, and their price is kept artificially low by huge state subsidies".

Honours

Foreign honours

Lithuania:
- Grand Cross of the Order for Merits to Lithuania (2 March 2017)
Mali:
- Commander of the National Order of Mali (4 April 2016)
Ukraine:
- Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, 1st class (23 August 2022)

Honorary degrees

2023 – Honorary Doctorate, Université Toulouse Capitole
2022 – Honorary Doctorate, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Other awards

2019 – Forbes' list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, position 4
2020 – Forbes' list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, position 4
2020 – Global Citizen Prize for World Leader
2022 – BBC 100 Women
2022 – Global Goalkeeper Award, presented by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Goalkeepers program
2022 – Forbes' list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, position 1
2023 – Forbes' list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, position 1

Images for kids

2005 campaign poster featuring von der Leyen
Ursula von der Leyen at a horse show in Hagen in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2013
Von der Leyen with German soldiers during a visit to the Field Marshal Rommel Barracks, Augustdorf (2014)
Chuck Hagel and Ursula von der Leyen at the September 2014 NATO summit in Newport, Wales
Von der Leyen and General Bekir Ercan Van (far left), the commander of Incirlik Air Base, who was accused of complicity in the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt
Von der Leyen during the MSC 2017
Ursula von der Leyen with US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (2015 in Berlin)
German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen after being received by Vice Admiral AR Karve, Chief of Staff, Western Naval Command during her visit to India
Ursula von der Leyen addressing the European Parliament on 16 July 2019
Von der Leyen with her proposed College of Commissioners on 19 November 2019
Von der Leyen delivering her first State of the European Union address on 16 September 2020
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and von der Leyen meeting in Helsinki on 4 October 2021
Von der Leyen speaking at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow
Von der Leyen with US President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders on special NATO meeting, 24 March 2022
Von der Leyen with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other G7 leaders at the 48th G7 summit in Germany, 26 June 2022
Von der Leyen with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in Brussels, 3 November 2022
Von der Leyen with President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv, 15 September 2022
Von der Leyen with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, 18 July 2022
Von der Leyen with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, 12 July 2023
Von der Leyen with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and other leaders at the International Conference on Development and Migration in Rome, 23 July 2023
Von der Leyen with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in Cairo, 18 November 2023
von der Leyen with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo in Kyiv, 24 February 2024
President von der Leyen with Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, New Delhi on 25 April 2022
Demonstration on 17 April 2009 against internet censorship
Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China, 6 April 2023
Von der Leyen with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Brussels, January 2023