Martin Westlake / Oct 2025
Photo: Shutterstock
A week after Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission ‘survived’ two censure motion votes in the European Parliament (though there was never any doubt it would do so), and just one year after von der Leyen’s second Commission took up office, it might seem a little premature to be speculating about a third mandate for the President, yet the runes are there. As José Manuel Barroso once put it, all Commission Presidents act, and are judged, in the shadow of Jacques Delors.
Barroso was understandably proud of his ten years at the Commission’s helm – the same as Jacques Delors. But while Barroso served two mandates (2004-2009 and 2010-2014), Delors effectively served three (1985-1988, 1989-1992, and 1992-1994). Prior to the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty, a Commission mandate was for four years. Delors’ last mandate of two years was to enable the Commission’s mandate to become synchronised with the electoral cycle of the European Parliament (it is extraordinary to think that these were not synchronised before that).
There is no term limit in the Treaties. For somebody to serve three terms and fifteen years would be an all-time record. It would surpass the ten years served by Delors and Barroso and would equal the three mandates won by Delors. Were Ursula von der Leyen to win a third mandate she could lay claim to being a great, if not the greatest, President of the European Commission. She might no longer be in the shadow of Jacques Delors.
What of her age? Von der Leyen celebrated her 68th birthday on 8th October this year. She will be 71 by the end of her second mandate. She would be 76 by the end of her third. A highly dynamic lady, memorably filmed jogging during her re-election campaign last year, and as a doctor very careful about her health, she would be a spring chicken compared with the currently 79-year-old 47th President of the United States. She is not immortal – a severe dose of pneumonia in January this year demonstrated that. But age is surely not an issue at the moment – the energy and the ambition show no signs of waning – and nor, probably, would it be in 2029.
More, perhaps, than was the case with Barroso, there is an implicit bifurcation in von der Leyen’s second mandate; will this be about legacy, or a third mandate? The beauty of the situation is that she does not have to decide. Indeed, just as with her second mandate, it would in any case be in her interest to play her cards close to her chest for as long as possible. After all, two full terms will already have been an extraordinary achievement.
Inter alia, she will have wrestled with Covid (particularly the provision of vaccines) and the ensuing economic crisis (Next Generation EU and the ground-breaking Recovery and Resilience Facility); she will have overseen the tail end of the Brexit process and marshalled the EU’s strong reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the end of her second mandate, she may well have overseen a renewal of the enlargement process (Albania and Moldova in particular stand impatiently in the wings) and may have helped manage some sort of post-conflict resolution in Ukraine. She has already definitively answered Henry Kissinger’s question about who to call when America wants to talk to Europe. Indeed, the respect she has earned from Donald Trump is an extraordinary achievement.
In short, Ursula von der Leyen could leave the Commission Presidency in 2029 with her head held very high. But a third mandate would put her in a different universe.
Either way, delivery will of course be important. Although there is a different imperative between legacy delivery (this is what I did) and delivery with a view to a third mandate (this is what I’m doing, and this is what I would do), von der Leyen will have the advantages and the power of incumbency. And, since the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, those advantages include non-voting membership of the European Council.
Were the European Commission President to envisage a possible third term (and, to be clear, this article is pure speculation on my part) she would face a number of known unknowns. In purely formal terms, a third mandate would require a qualified majority in the European Council and an absolute majority in the European Parliament. Less formally, opposition from a larger member state would spell doom. What might the configuration of the European Council look like in 2029?
If Fidez, Smer and ANO remain in power in, respectively, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia, then a von der Leyen candidature almost certainly could not rely on the support of Viktor Orban, Robert Fico and Andrej Babis, but as long as no blocking minority (four member states representing 35% of the EU’s total population) were to be formed, she could probably wear such opposition as a badge of honour.
More important considerations would be the identities of the office holders in the Franco-German axis. The next French Presidential election must be held by April 2027. If Marine Le Pen (or another RN candidate) were to be elected President, then von der Leyen would presumably be left with a legacy scenario alone. The next German general election must be held by February 2029. Anything short of a CDU/CSU majority would similarly spell the end of any third term possibility.
The identity and political colour of the heads of state or government in Italy, Poland and Spain would surely matter also.
Two other vital considerations would be the size of the centre and the degree of fragmentation in the European Parliament after the 2029 European elections. At the moment, the centre still holds, as the votes in the two censure motions demonstrated (378 and 383 against). At the time of writing, Politico’s poll of polls (voting intentions if an election were to be held today) shows the trio of EPP (175), S&D (130) and Renew (64) on 369 votes (the required absolute majority being 361).
The EPP vote begs another question although, again, von der Leyen’s status as incumbent could play in her favour; namely, would she be the EPP party’s Spitzenkandidat (or lead candidate)? If she were the Spitzenkandidat then the Parliament’s centre would surely put its weight behind her (though naturally in return for concessions of various sorts about the composition of her third college, the portfolios of the members and her declared policy priorities). Clearly, she would not declare her candidature in the absence of Spitzenkandidat status.
What might prevent her getting that status? One possibility would be if her own EPP group in the Parliament chose another preferred candidate, perhaps of another nationality, through the primaries process. By their nature, that candidate would not be carrying all the baggage that von der Leyen will have accumulated by the end of her second mandate. And it should not be forgotten that authority and success breed resentment and jealousy.
In any case, Ursula von der Leyen has already amply demonstrated that she has the required skill set to make it to a third mandate. In the first place, she has great, if not complete, control of her machine, the Commission. The way she has consolidated the centralisation of power was not her invention. Arguably, it began with Jacques Delors and was certainly reinforced by José Manuel Barroso and Jean-Claude Juncker, and is to a considerable extent an inevitable consequence of the sheer numerical size of the college. But von der Leyen 2.0 has no Thierry Breton, no Frans Timmermans and no Margrethe Vestager to protest and provide push back (as she did in von der Leyen 1.0). Spanish Socialist and First Executive Vice-President of the European Commission Teresa Ribeira is the only potential doughty opponent within von der Leyen 2.0 but has (surely not coincidentally) a massive portfolio to keep her very busy.
In the second place, von der Leyen has demonstrated great skill in pragmatic management and ‘maintenance’ of the centre in the European Parliament on which she depends. And in the third place, related to that, von der Leyen has shown great political and policy flexibility – one has only to compare and contrast the legislative ambitions of von der Leyen 1.0 with the negative omnibus ambitions of von der Leyen 2.0.
Much has been made of the way the European Parliament’s fringes have discovered the censure motion – not as a viable ambition to bring the Commission down, but to repeatedly disrupt its work and undermine its long-term credibility. After all, only 72 signatures are required to table a censure motion (as opposed to a majority of component members (361) and a two-thirds majority of those voting to pass such a motion).
But if the centre in the Parliament – which, has been seen, still holds – gets frustrated with such repeated disruption it can use its inherent absolute majority to amend Rule 131 of its rules of procedure, either to impose a longer cooling-off period, or a higher threshold, or both. Such a move would coincidentally enable the main groups to tighten their grip on the Parliament’s crown jewel in terms of extracting concessions from the Commission.
Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once observed (perhaps apocryphally) that ‘a week is a long time in politics’. By such standards, four years is an eternity. Who knows what the world has in store for von der Leyen 2.0 between now and 2029? In any case, whether for legacy or to lay the foundations of a third term, she will be looking for flagship achievements. There will, ultimately, be agreement on the new Multi Annual Financial Framework simply because there has to be one. Will there be significant progress on Ukraine? Might the arrival of one or more new member states create renewed a sense of momentum in the Western Balkans and Eastern Europe? Will von der Leyen 2.0 single out significant winnables from the Letta and Draghi reports and kick start growth?
This is to pile speculation on speculation, but by 2028 von der Leyen may have come to be regarded as Delors was in 1990; that is to say, a known quantity, a safe pair of hands, representing continuity and stability. Not so much an Angela Merkel, perhaps, as a Wilfried Martens, who served as Belgian Prime Minister from 1979 to 1992, overseeing his governments’ responses to a series of crises and economic and constitutional reforms; in other words, a steady ship in a stormy sea.
There is even a hint of destiny about von der Leyen’s continued presence in Brussels; after all, she was born there (her father, Ernst Albrecht, served as the European Commission’s first Director General for Competition Policy, 1967-1970)! The fact that Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s first ever female President and only the second German President after Walter Hallstein (1958-1967 = nine years!) has made it this far is already a remarkable achievement. As the days, months and years go by, the necessary basic conditions for a possible third term may well wither away, in which case Ursula von der Leyen will leave as one of the three longest-serving Presidents of the Commission and also, arguably, as one of its greatest. But a third mandate and all that it would bring is surely not to be ruled out just yet.
A first version of this paper was delivered at a 14 October 2025 Europaeum Round Table on ‘Promise and Performance in the Berlaymont: Perspectives on von der Leyen 2.0’
