Strasbourg (France): Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen has been elected as the next President of the European Commission with a slim majority.
She made history as the first female chief executive of the European Union on Tuesday, July 16. The slim majority also helped avert a political crisis for the world’s largest trading bloc, Xinhua reported.
Of the 733 votes cast by members of the European Parliament, she won 383 votes, only 9 votes more than the necessary 374-vote majority. Had her nomination – without objection from any of the 28 EU member state governments – been shot down, Brussels would be deep in uncharted political waters.
Instead, the mother-of-seven and Germany’s first female Defence Minister thanked lawmakers with a smile and said “The task ahead of us humbles me. It’s a big responsibility and my work starts now.”
Her election was preceded by good news on Tuesday as a barrage of politicians, including senior EU lawmakers, threw their support behind her in Strasbourg. But the vote in the seat of the EU legislature was a secret ballot, potentially enabling lawmakers to break from official lines.
Von der Leyen was born and grew up in Brussels, Belgium, where her father once served as a senior officer in the EU. She will, upon taking office in November, oversee the EU’s executive branch of around 32,000 staff in her birth place and represent the 500-million-strong economy in the world.
A trained gynaecologist, she was fluent in English, French and German and she made a point of that by speaking the three languages in one speech on Tuesday morning to EU lawmakers, in a last bid to win their support.
