Ursula von der Leyen

Biography

Ursula von der Leyen, born Ursula Albrecht in Brussels in 1958, grew up speaking German and French as the daughter of Ernst Albrecht, an early European civil servant who later led Lower Saxony. She studied economics at Gottingen and briefly at the London School of Economics, then switched to medicine at Hannover Medical School, where she qualified as a physician and in 1991 took her doctorate.

After working at the Hannover Medical School and living in Stanford, California, she entered local CDU politics in the Hanover region and became a Lower Saxony state minister in 2003. Angela Merkel brought her into the federal cabinet in 2005 as family minister; she moved to labour and social affairs in 2009 and in 2013 became Germany's first woman defence minister, a tenure clouded by a consultancy-contracts affair.

Nominated by the European Council, she was confirmed by the European Parliament in July 2019 and took office in December as the first woman president of the European Commission. Her commission dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Green Deal and the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, while her undisclosed text messages with Pfizer's chief executive became a transparency scandal.

She led the European People's Party campaign in 2024 and was re-elected by the Parliament that July with 401 votes.