Former French Prime Minister and ex-EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has accused Ursula von der Leyen of presiding over an “authoritarian drift” during her tenure in Brussels’s top post.
The European Union has become less democratically oriented — and critics would say it was hardly this in the first place — and less concerned with issues facing the common man under the technocratic rule of Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen, Monsieur Barneir told POLITICO.
Speaking ahead of the launch of his book, What I Have Learnt from You, the 74-year-old French politician and former Eurocrat said that there has been a noticeable “authoritarian drift” in the EU, which “has increased a notch in the last six years with Ursula von der Leyen, who wants to decide everything.”
Barnier lamented that von der Leyen’s Commission acts like a collection of “super technocrats” rather than politicians beholden to their citizens. “There isn’t enough listening. There isn’t enough listening to the people,” he said.
However, it could be argued that this is a feature of the structures of the EU itself rather than a bug. Indeed, Mrs von der Leyen was not democratically elected by the peoples of Europe, but instead was installed following a series of backroom deals in Brussels, following which the elected European Parliament gave its assent.
Von der Leyen has been steeped in the notion of unelected, borderless elites governing Europe since birth. German by blood, she was raised in Brussels, having been born to European diplomat Ernst Albrecht, who helped establish the very same European Commission she now controls, in 1958. She was even educated in a school specifically designed to train the children of European diplomats and civil servants.
Since coming to power in 2019, von der Leyen has overseen a strengthening of EU censorship tools, such as implementing the Digital Services Act, which gave Brussels fresh powers to fine social media companies if they fail to police so-called hate speech and disinformation on their platforms. The DSA allows for fines of up to 6 per cent of a firm’s global annual turnover if found to violate the bloc’s speech codes.
The EU chief was also one of the world’s leading voices advocating for lockdowns and other draconian measures during the Chinese coronavirus, which hit the world a year after she came to power. During the crisis, von der Leyen championed the implementation of Covid passports in Europe, which later became the basis for the World Health Organization’s own health passport.
Additionally, the globalist politician has sought to use the purse strings in Brussels to punish socially conservative EU member states such as Hungary and Poland for upholding traditional values on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ issues, in a bid to damage leaders like Viktor Orbán for refusing to go along with the prevailing progressive orthodoxy she favours.
Despite driving up the cost of energy for common people and imposing heavy restrictions on farmers, the green agenda has also been a major component of von der Leyen’s tenure.
Former Brexit negotiator Barnier said that the EU chief’s disregard for working-class people was evident during his time in Brussels, claiming that during the divorce negotiations with Britain, issues surrounding European fishermen were “a secondary, possibly even marginal” point for von der Leyen.
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