(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Mejor sin Von der Leyen)

Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, does not want to talk about the coup d’état being perpetrated in Spain by the man who is her greatest protégé among the 27 rulers of the European Union member countries, Pedro Sánchez. So concerned about supposed threats to the rule of law in other countries with conservative governments, she is quite calm while Sánchez violates the Spanish Constitution and every law that gets in his way.

Mrs. Von der Leyen has had nothing but praise for the greatest liar and betrayer of his word and of the law that Spain can remember, the man who has assembled a government on a majority of coup-plotting criminals and terrorists, who threatens and harasses the judges, the opposition and the journalists.

Mrs. Von der Leyen is a member of the People’s Party but has been, for five years, the greatest and most implacable representative of the leftist, interventionist, socialist and authoritarian drift of the European Union. Despite all this, the People’s Party of Spain has supported a new Von der Leyen candidacy for the presidency of the Commission, and Mr. Núñez Feijóo has paraded her around Spain as if she were a great defender of Spain, when she has been the concealer of all of Sánchez’s outrages and his financier.

Mrs. Von der Leyen has abused the power she has held, so much so during the pandemic, not only with vaccine purchases without oversight or scrutiny that various prosecutors’ offices are investigating. She had troubles as a minister in Germany, but the suspicions of corruption have soared even further since then.

Mrs. Von der Leyen has used the European Commission as if it were a central government that, from Brussels, governs the 27 countries of the European Union, when it has no competence to act that way and is a mere administrator at the service of the nations, and not an authoritarian head of government above the nations who punishes and rewards with absolute arbitrariness, as she has done.

Mrs. Von der Leyen is a notorious political swindler who in 2019 managed to deceive the government of Poland of the conservative Law and Justice party into voting for her as president of the European Commission. The Polish government ordered its parliamentarians to vote for her. It was 26 votes that gave her a presidency she won by only 9 votes. Afterward she spent four years harassing the Polish government and blocking its funds until she managed, with the help of the German government and media, to bring down the conservative government in Warsaw.

She also asked for the vote of the other members of the Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR) of the European Parliament. The others, among them VOX, said no, because we saw her coming.

Mrs. Von der Leyen knows that in the secret ballot for her election there will be many, even from her own party, who will not vote for her because they know her. The Slovenes of the PP do not even hide their NO. It is already announced. That is why, in exchange for their votes, she is promising some things to Giorgia Meloni of the ECR and the opposite things to the socialists and the greens so that they vote for her. And so that she may then once again break her word with the conservatives and set about imposing the Green Deal, Agenda 2030 and the whole totalitarian program of the most arrogant globalism, the one that most despises the interests of European societies.

Mrs. Von der Leyen — her remaining in the presidency of the European Commission — would in reality be a political gift for all of us who consider that the sovereign nations must become much angrier still with this globalist and totalitarian-social-engineering drift of the European Union. Her arrogance and classism guarantee that the sovereigntist forces that do not want a centralized mega-state in Europe are going to keep winning elections in these coming years and sharpening the internal contradictions in the People’s Party so that it decides which side it is on.

But the truth is that the People’s Party has half a dozen figures who could be balanced, honest presidents of the European Commission with the intention of respecting the will shown by Europeans at the ballot box to put a brake on the legislative and regulatory follies and to stop the frenzy of ecological socialism with its gratuitous and often useless impositions that do immense harm to the primary sector and to societies in general. That is why, for the sake of steering the European Union back toward its salvation — which lies in very deep amendments to the follies perpetrated — the People’s Party would do very well to get rid of Mrs. Von der Leyen and choose a candidate who is not known for abuse, imposition and deception.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.