The reconfirmed President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyenborn Ursula Gertrud Albrecht, class of 1958, zodiac sign Libra, is German but was born in Ixelles, in the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium.
His father, Ersnt Albrecht, was, among other things, general director of the Competition Commission, before returning to his homeland and becoming president of Lower Saxony, after having served for a period as CEO of Bahlsen, a company that produces biscuits and sweets . In the last phase of his life he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, which von der Leyen recalled in his speeches, telling how his father, at the end of his life, spoke of Europe as a member of the family . The Albrechts were one of the noble families of the Kingdom of Hanover. Until the age of 13 Ursula studied at the European School in Brussels, then her family returned to Germany.
He speaks fluent English and French, as well as German; she lived for over a year in London, where she fled in 1978, when her family was informed that the Red Army Faction intended to kidnap her, as she was the daughter of a well-known CDU politician. She lived in the British capital under an assumed name, under the protection of Scotland Yard, and she attended the London School of Economics. In 1986 she married Heiko von der Leyen, a doctor, from a family of silk merchants who became nobles in the 18th century. They had 7 children between 1987 and 1999; they lived for a few years in California, where he taught. She also graduated in medicine, specializing in gynecology. She met her husband in the choir at the University of Göttingen; In your youth you recorded songs with a religious background.
In 2003 she became a parliamentarian for Lower Saxony, dealing with family, women and health in local government. In 2005 she became Federal Minister for Family and Youth in Angela Merkel’s government; from 2009 to 2013 she was Minister of Labor and Social Issues, fighting for female quotas in boards of directors, for homosexual marriages and for the national minimum wage, progressive positions that earned her quite a few enemies in the conservative wing of the CDU/CSU . From 2013 to 2019 you were Minister of Defense; since 2016 you have sat on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum. On 2 July 2019, she was appointed President of the European Commission., first woman to hold the role, thanks to an agreement between Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel; she was then elected to the European Parliament with only 9 votes. Since then he has lived during the week in the Berlaymont palace, where he sleeps in a room (apparently without windows), to return at weekends to his farm in Burgdorf-Beinhorn, near Hanover, in Lower Saxony, where he keeps horses (one of his Dolly, was mauled by a wolf in 2022).
The Green Deal, a series of laws that aim to decarbonize the EU economy by making it climate neutral by 2050, was the defining feature of her first term, in addition to the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the joint purchase of vaccines and the Green Pass for travel. Since February 24, 2022, she has been one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters, together with the President of the Parliament Roberta Metsola. She has a notoriously bad relationship with the outgoing President of the European Council, Charles Michel, who left her alone on the sofa to sit in an armchair and talk face to face with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
#Ursula #von #der #Leyen #president #European #Commission