While Ursula von der Leyen may have survived yesterday’s vote of no confidence, the result has laid bare growing cross-party discontent with her increasingly authoritarian leadership. Support for the European President is eroding.
The most notable shift was from the right-wing ECR group, which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Previously, these MEPs had supported von der Leyen on several key proposals, but few voted against this motion, with most opting to desert it altogether. Also revealing was the support the motion received beyond its Right-populist sponsors: several MEPs from The Left group as well as non-affiliated Left-populist deputies from Germany and elsewhere, also backed it. Overall, von der Leyen secured the backing of 360 MEPs — 40 fewer than in her 2024 re-election.
A key point of convergence between these otherwise divergent forces is their shared opposition to the Commission’s belligerent stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Indeed, the no-confidence motion also referenced the Commission’s proposal of using an emergency clause in the EU treaty to shut MEPs out of approving a €150 billion loan scheme to boost the joint procurement of weapons by EU countries, mainly to increase military support for Ukraine.
It’s important to note that the motion of censure wasn’t just directed at von der Leyen but at her entire Commission — in particular, her second-in-command, Kaja Kallas, Commission Vice-President and High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the closest thing the EU has to a foreign minister.
Kallas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia — a country of just 1.4 million people, fewer than reside in Paris — was confirmed as the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs in December of last year. Since then, she has come to personify, more vividly than anyone else, the EU’s toxic blend of incompetence, irrelevance and outright stupidity.
At a time when the war in Ukraine is unquestionably Europe’s foremost foreign policy challenge, it is difficult to imagine anyone less suited to the role than Kallas, whose deep-seated hostility towards Russia borders on obsession. On her very first day in the job, during a trip to Kyiv, she tweeted: “The European Union wants Ukraine to win this war” — a statement that immediately caused unease in Brussels, where officials viewed it as out of step with settled EU language two years into the war. “She is still acting like a prime minister”, one diplomat commented.
Just months before her appointment, she proposed breaking Russia into “small states” and, since then, has repeatedly demanded the full restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea — a position that effectively rules out negotiations. While even Donald Trump has acknowledged that Ukrainian Nato membership is a non-starter, Kallas insists it remain a goal — despite it having been a red line for Russia for nearly two decades. Kallas has even declared that “if we don’t help Ukraine further, we should all start learning Russian”. Never mind that Russia has no strategic, military or economic reason to attack the EU. Earlier this year, she denounced Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war, dismissing them as a “dirty deal”, which explains why US Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly cancelled a scheduled meeting with her in February.
Kallas’s single-minded fixation on Russia has rendered her virtually silent on every other foreign policy issue. As former UK diplomat Ian Proud, who served at the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019, observed, she comes across as a “single-issue High Representative” who is “intent only on sustaining the decade-long European policy on non-engagement with Russia, whatever the economic cost”.
Her aggressive, unilateral rhetoric — often delivered without prior consultation with member states — has alienated not only openly Euro- and Nato-sceptic governments in Hungary and Slovakia, but also countries like Spain and Italy, which, while broadly aligned with Nato’s Ukraine policy, don’t share Kallas’s assessment of Moscow as an imminent threat to the EU. “If you listen to her it seems we are at war with Russia, which is not the EU line”, one EU official complained.
Technically, the High Representative’s role is to reflect the consensus of the member states as an extension of the Council, not to freelance as a supranational policymaker. Yet, Kallas interprets her role otherwise, repeatedly acting as though she speaks on behalf of all Europeans — a top-down, anti-democratic approach that is symptomatic of a broader authoritarian trend supercharged by von der Leyen.
Despite her proclamations about defending democracy, Kallas herself has no democratic mandate. Not only was she never elected to her current office, but her party — the Estonian Reform Party — received fewer than 70,000 votes in the last European Parliament elections, representing less than 0.02% of the European population. Von der Leyen, though, has packed her Commission with these like-minded Baltic officials — hailing from a region of just over six million people — to fill key defence and foreign policy posts. These appointments reflect a strategic alignment between von der Leyen’s centralising ambitions and the ultra-hawkish worldview of the Baltic political class. Both share an unwavering commitment to the Nato line and a deep hostility to any diplomacy with Moscow.
Kallas’s anti-Russian zeal made her a natural choice for the job. But rarely mentioned is the fact that Kallas’s own family, far from being the victim of Soviet oppression, actually lived a relatively comfortable life as part of the Soviet establishment — or what may very well be considered the Soviet middle class.
In fact, Kaja Kallas was born into one of Estonia’s most powerful political families — a family whose rise was facilitated, in no small part, by the very Soviet system she now demonises. Her father, Siim Kallas, was an influential member of the Soviet apparatchik and then a key figure in Estonian post-Soviet politics, eventually becoming Prime Minister before serving as a European Commissioner for over a decade. Few will be surprised to learn that immediately after completing her studies, in 2010, Kaja decided to enter politics and joined the Reform Party — her father’s own party — nor that she followed his footsteps in moving to Brussels after serving as Prime Minister from 2021 to 2024. It’s hard to shake the idea that elite continuity and inherited privilege had a helping hand. One is also left wondering, given her upbringing, whether her aggressive anti-Russian posture is a sincerely held conviction, or a cover for personal ambition.
One story sheds particularly interesting light on her geopolitical attitude. In 2023, when Kallas was still Prime Minister, three major Estonian newspapers called for her resignation after it emerged that her husband’s transport company had continued to do business with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. However, Kallas dismissed the scandal and refused to resign, claiming no wrongdoing, sparking accusations of hypocrisy: demanding the total economic isolation of Russia on one hand, while turning a blind eye to her own family’s business ties with the country.
All things considered, Kallas is dramatically ill-suited for the job — stumbling from one blunder to the next. Only recently, she managed to offend nearly every Irish citizen by suggesting that Ireland’s neutrality stems from not having experienced atrocities such as “mass deportations” or “suppression of culture and language” — a bizarre statement, given Ireland’s long history of British colonial rule and the bloodshed of the Troubles.
“Kallas’s anti-Russian zeal made her a natural choice for the job.”
Some blunders are far more consequential. In a recent meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Kallas demanded that China condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine and fall in line with the “rules-based international order”. Yi, usually soft-spoken, responded sharply, noting that China had not supported Russia militarily — but also had no intention of seeing Moscow defeated, since that would simply bring the West’s wrath upon China next. He may have been alluding to Kallas’s earlier remark: “If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can it take on China?”. That a senior EU official would frame global affairs in such stark, confrontational terms reflects an astonishing lack of diplomatic nuance.
The fact that Kallas felt comfortable lecturing China on international law and the “rules-based order” reveals not only a striking blindness to Europe’s diminished global standing, but also a profound lack of self-awareness about how the EU’s double standards are viewed in Beijing and across the Global South. While loudly condemning Russian attacks on civilians, Kallas has consistently whitewashed — or outright endorsed — Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. A recently leaked EU report confirmed that Brussels acknowledged a long time ago that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, including “starvation, torture, indiscriminate attacks and apartheid” — yet Kallas has neither condemned Israel nor questioned EU-Israel ties. Similarly, she said nothing about US threats to annex Greenland and supported the US-Israeli bombing of Iran — a clear violation of international law.
This selective moralism has done lasting damage to the EU’s credibility, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. But to lay the blame solely at Kallas’s feet would be a mistake. In the end, it’s not Kallas who should concern us most, but the system that made her possible — a system that rewards the loudest hawks, holds scant regard for democracy, and replaces statesmanship with social media posturing. If Europe continues on this path, it won’t just lose its place in the world; it will become the most vivid expression of the West’s broader slide into kakistocracy — government by the worst, the least qualified and the most unscrupulous.
