(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Trump desnuda a la bruja)
It would be funny. After all the mockery this European Commission and its president Ursula von der Leyen have directed at the US and all the insults they have hurled at its president Donald Trump, we may be given the amusing and certainly comforting paradox that it should be the greatest act of submission to Donald Trump ever seen on the international stage that finishes off this European Commission, with the lady president leading the way.
The humiliation at Canossa of the Germanic emperor Henry IV looks like a joke compared with that visit by von der Leyen to the premises of one of the golf clubs owned by Trump in Scotland, to say yes, yes, yes and yes to President Trump on every one of his demands. Some of them are impossible to fulfil and many are not remotely within the competence of the European Commission, and its president has absolutely no power to grant them.
Neither the astronomical European investments nor the purchases of North American energy fall within the competence of this lady, whom they called “the Queen of Sheba” when a year ago she made her second Commission to her own measure, with Teresa Ribera and a whole series of people with cupboards full of skeletons. But whom everyone, even those closest to her, considers more witch than queen.
Von der Leyen, who is a “doberman” in her mistreatment of all the conservative and patriotic forces that are critical of her demented ideological, environmental, economic and international-relations policies, turned in Scotland into a lapdog of the owner of the golf course, of the negotiations and of the discourse. It is clear that Trump enjoyed the run-around he gave this lady, who declared herself delighted with everything.
The 27 leaders of the member countries, who were not consulted about the steps she was taking, something very habitual with her, heard and read, some with horror and the rest with ill-disguised apprehension, the conditions that Trump enumerated with relish.
Trump has once again done the world a great favour, one more, and it has been to make clear even to the most faithful devotees of “suicidal Europeanism” that von der Leyen is a public danger, not only to democracy and freedom, which many do not care about, but to their own pockets and to their standing before their own electorates. Thus it has been shown once again that the groups to the right of von der Leyen’s People’s Party are right. And Mrs Ursula now has serious problems. As Viktor Orbán said, Trump’s heavyweight has had the featherweight for breakfast, a featherweight that is only proud, arrogant and abusive with the weak who live under her tyranny. And under her permanent abuse of power and of competences that are not her own.
On 10 July last in Strasbourg, the president of the European Commission managed to survive a motion of censure but she certainly did not emerge unscathed. The 175 votes in favour of her censure and fall, the 360 against and 18 abstentions saved her political neck, but they do not tell the whole story, because missing from them are 155 votes of deputies who, though present in Strasbourg, absented themselves so as not to vote.
Even on that day Mrs Ursula was very short of support. Today she would probably be far shorter of it, and it should no longer be surprising if, should things go a little more awry for her, she faces a much more matured and coordinated motion this autumn. With a far more uncertain outcome.
Because the agreement with Donald Trump may in fact become the final catastrophe of this German politician overrated to the point of the ridiculous. After failing resoundingly in three ministries in the German federal government, she reached the presidency of the European Commission through a manoeuvre by the ineffable Emmanuel Macron and after beheading the Spitzenkandidat, Manfred Weber, and some other candidates.
She has shown that she lacks scruples and the least empathy with the citizens of the European nations she mistreats. She has also had an instinct for power, a capacity for intrigue and arrogance more than enough to make herself strong, as she has done through a very determined use of the reins of the bureaucratic monster. But now she has crossed paths with Donald Trump and the Queen of Sheba has been left naked and utterly ridiculous. And that is the most difficult thing to survive in politics.
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.