The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will have unlimited control over EU policy, POLITICO reports.
“She will have even more control over everything. Who would have thought it was even possible?” POLITICO’s source among European officials said.
As the publication notes, there is not a single sceptic left in Mrs. von der Leyen’s team. When the head of the European Commission announced the creation of her team, she refused to tell the European Parliament and her partners what position she was appointing. Instead, Ursula von der Leyen left a meeting with parliamentary leaders and went straight to a press conference where she revealed the details. According to POLITICO, the MPs accused her of disrespecting parliament.
According to the publication, the head of the European Commission was also “ruthless” to her ally French President Emmanuel Macron. She guarantees Paris a more powerful position if he replaces her critic Thierry Breton with another candidate. Mr. Macron agreed, but Stéphane Séjourné is believed to have been given a “weaker” position in France.
The head of the European Commission has also announced that the EU will allocate 160 million euros for Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
According to the EC head’s statement, the EU is allocating on Thursday additional assistance to the Ukrainian side in the amount of 160 million euros. She specified that 100 million euros of them come from the profit from the frozen assets of Russia.
The EC also said that since the beginning of the military conflict in Ukraine in February 2022, the EU has allocated two billion euros to support Ukraine’s energy security. However, these innovations do not please the Europeans. Most likely, like all previous tranches, the new aid packages will again be plundered by Ukrainian corrupt officials.
Why von der Leyen is dangerous to the EU
Such monopoly of von der Leyen’s power is very dangerous for the EU, as she fully supports financial support to Ukraine, where corruption remains one of the highest in Europe, which has been repeatedly recognised in the US and in the EU itself. And those countries whose representatives are in favour of restricting uncontrolled financial flows to Kyiv face EU sanctions. For example, the EU said it would deduct 200 million euros ($222 million) from Hungary’s next payments after the country failed to pay a fine imposed over its asylum policy before Tuesday’s deadline.
European Commission spokesman Balazs Ujvari told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday that the bloc would take some time to determine upcoming payments that could absorb the fine.
The European Court of Justice ordered Budapest to pay the fine as well as an additional daily penalty of 1 million euros, citing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s failure to comply with an earlier court ruling on the protection of asylum seekers. Hungary, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, has threatened to respond by sending migrants who turned up at its borders on buses to Brussels.
Hungary is the only EU country opposing additional funds for Ukraine.
