Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen (; born 8 October 1958) is a German politician and physician who has served as President of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as Federal Minister for Defence. She is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its affiliated European political party, the European People's Party (EPP). On 7 March 2024, the EPP elected her as its Spitzenkandidat to lead the campaign for the 2024 European Parliament elections. She was re-elected to head the Commission in July 2024.
Von der Leyen was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, to German parents. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French, and moved to Germany in 1971 when her father became involved in German politics. She graduated from the London School of Economics in 1978, and in 1987, she acquired her medical licence from Hanover Medical School. After marrying fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen, she lived for four years in the United States with her family in the 1990s. After returning to Germany she became involved in local politics in the Hanover region in the late 1990s, and she served as a cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2005.
In 2005, von der Leyen joined the federal cabinet, first as Minister for Family Affairs and Youth from 2005 to 2009, then taking on the role of Minister for Labour and Social Affairs from 2009 to 2013, and finally serving as Minister for Defence from 2013 to 2019, the first woman to do so.Arne Delfs (22 January 2014), "Merkel Succession Beckons After Von der Leyen's Defence Posting", Businessweek. When she left office, she was the only minister to have served continuously in Merkel's cabinet since Merkel became chancellor. She served as a deputy leader of the CDU from 2010 to 2019, and was regarded as a leading contender to succeed Merkel as the chancellor of Germany and as the favourite to become the secretary general of NATO after Jens Stoltenberg. British defence secretary Michael Fallon described her in 2019 as "a star presence" in the NATO community and "the doyenne of NATO ministers for over five years". In 2023, she was again regarded as the favourite to take the role.
On 2 July 2019, von der Leyen was proposed by the European Council as the candidate for president of the European Commission. She was then elected by the European Parliament on 16 July; she took office on 1 December, becoming the first woman to hold the office. Her tenure has been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Green Deal, the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as American threats to annex Greenland. In November 2022 she announced that her commission would work to establish an International Criminal Tribunal for the Russian Federation. The EUUS Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade, announced in August 2025, exposed her to criticism from France and Germany.
On 18 July 2024, von der Leyen was re-elected as Commission President by the European Parliament with an absolute majority of 401 members of the European Parliament out of 720; strengthened by around 30 votes compared to her election in 2019. She was named the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Family and early life
Von der Leyen was born in 1958 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, where she lived until she was 13 years old. In 1971, she relocated to Sehnde in the Hanover region after her father had become CEO of the food company Bahlsen and involved in state politics in Lower Saxony.
In 1986, she married physician Heiko von der Leyen, a member of the von der Leyen family, which belonged to the German nobility and made its fortune as silk merchants. They have seven children, born between 1987 and 1999. Von der Leyen is Lutheran.
She lives with her family on a farm in Burgdorf near Hanover where they keep horses. She is a keen equestrian and has been involved in competitive horseriding.
Education and professional career
Von der Leyen moved to the Hanover Region in 1971 when her father entered politics to become minister-president of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. In 1977, she started studying economics at the University of Göttingen. At the height of the fear of communist terrorism in West Germany, she fled to London in 1978 after her family was told that the Red Army Faction (RAF) was planning to kidnap her due to her being the daughter of a prominent politician. She spent more than a year in hiding in London, where she lived with protection from Scotland Yard under the name Rose Ladson to avoid detection and enrolled at the London School of Economics. A German diminutive of Rose, Röschen, had been her nickname since childhood, while Ladson was the name of her American great-grandmother's family, originally from Northamptonshire, who immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina in 1679, became wealthy landowners and slave traders of the Planter class, related to families of governors of the Province of Carolina. She said that she "lived more than she studied", and that London was "the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything" which "gave me an inner freedom that I have kept till today". She returned to Germany in 1979 but lived with a security detail at her side for several years.
In 1980, after three years of studying economics, she switched to medicine with a specialisation in gynaecology, at the Hannover Medical School, where she obtained her medical licence as a physician.
From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she defended the thesis and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University, returning to Germany in 1996.
From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hanover Medical School. In 2001, she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.
Plagiarism accusations In 2015, researchers collaborating at the VroniPlag Wiki reviewed von der Leyen's 1991 doctoral dissertation and alleged that 43.5% of the thesis pages contained plagiarism and in 23 cases citations were used that did not verify claims for which they were given. Multiple notable German academics such as and publicly accused von der Leyen of intended plagiarism. The Hannover Medical School conducted an investigation and concluded in March 2016 that while the thesis contains plagiarism, no intention to deceive could be proven.
The university decided not to revoke von der Leyen's medical degree. Critics questioned the independence of the commission that reviewed the thesis as von der Leyen personally knew its director from joint work for an alumni association. Various media outlets also criticised the decision for being non-transparent, not according to established rules, and failing to secure high academic standards.
Early political career Ursula von der Leyen joined the CDU in 1990, and became active in local politics in Lower Saxony in 1996, shortly after she had returned to Germany after living in California. She was a member of the committee on social policy of CDU in Lower Saxony from 1996, and also became active in the association of medical doctors in the CDU party.Who is EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen Euronews Retrieved 16 July 2019
In the Lower Saxony Landtag, 2003–2005 Ursula von der Leyen was elected to the Parliament of Lower Saxony in the 2003 state election for Lehrte, the same constituency then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder represented from 1986 to 1998. From 2003 to 2005 she was a minister in the state government of Lower Saxony, serving in the cabinet of Christian Wulff, with responsibility for social affairs, women, family, and health.
In 2003, von der Leyen was part of a group assigned by the then-opposition leader and CDU chairwoman Angela Merkel to draft alternative proposals for social welfare reform in response to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's "Agenda 2010". The so-called Herzog Commission, named after its chairman, the former German president Roman Herzog, recommended a comprehensive package of reform proposals including, among other things, decoupling health and nursing care premiums from people's earnings and levying a monthly lump sum across the board instead."German Opposition Split Over Reforms", Deutsche Welle, 8 October 2003.
Ahead of the 2005 federal elections, Angela Merkel chose Ursula von der Leyen to cover the family and social security portfolio in her shadow cabinet. In the negotiations to form a government following the election, von der Leyen led the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on families; her co-chair from the SPD was Renate Schmidt.Timot Szent-Ivanyi (25 October 2005), "Gutverdiener sollen höhere Kassenbeiträge zahlen" , Berliner Zeitung.
In the Bundestag, 2005–2019
Minister of Family Affairs and Youth, 2005–2009 In 2005, Ursula von der Leyen was appointed Federal Minister of Family Affairs and Youth in the cabinet of Angela Merkel. On the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, von der Leyen participated in the first joint cabinet meeting of the governments of Germany and Israel in Jerusalem in March 2008."Bilateral agreements reached at first Israeli-German intergovernmental consultations", Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, press release of 17 March 2008.
Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, 2009–2013 At the federal election of 2009, von der Leyen was elected to the Bundestag, Germany's Parliament, representing the 42nd electoral district of Hanover, alongside Edelgard Bulmahn of the Social Democrats. In the negotiations to form a coalition government following the elections, she led the CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on health policy; her co-chair from the FDP was Philipp Rösler. She was reappointed as family minister,Elizabeth Fullerton (27 November 2009), "Merkel moves German family minister to labor job", Reuters. but on 30 November 2009 succeeded Franz Josef Jung as Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs.
During her time in office, von der Leyen cultivated the image of being the social conscience of the CDU"A guide to future chancellors?", The Economist, 21 December 2013. and helped Merkel to move the CDU into the political centre-ground. In speaking out for increasing the number of childcare nurseries, for the introduction of a women's quota for listed companies' main boards, for gay marriage and a nationwide minimum wage, von der Leyen made enemies among the more traditionalist party members and won admirers on the left.Philip Oltermann (15 December 2013), "Ursula von der Leyen appointed as Germany's first female defence minister", in The Guardian dated 15 December 2013.
Von der Leyen also lobbied for lowering the barriers to immigration for some foreign workers, to fight shortages of skilled workers in Germany.Sabine Siebold, "Merkel says German multiculturalism has failed", Reuters, 16 October 2010 In 2013, she concluded an agreement with the Government of the Philippines that was aimed at helping Filipino health care professionals to gain employment in Germany. A vital provision of the agreement is that the Filipino workers are to be employed on the same terms and conditions as their German counterparts."Philippines and Germany conclude agreement to deploy Filipino health care professionals to Germany", Department of Foreign Affairs (Philippines) press release of 19 March 2013.