Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and the unelected figurehead of the European Union’s executive branch, has long postured as a paragon of transparency. In speech after speech, she has advocated for openness in governance, portraying the EU as a bulwark against the murky dealings of autocratic regimes. Yet, a recent ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has cast a harsh light on von der Leyen’s own conduct-exposing a glaring contradiction between her rhetoric and reality.

At the center of the scandal are a series of text messages allegedly exchanged between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. These messages reportedly played a key role in securing a colossal deal for 1.8 billion doses of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine. The problem? When asked to produce these texts, von der Leyen’s Commission essentially shrugged and claimed they had disappeared.

This is not just a matter of poor recordkeeping-it’s a matter of democratic accountability. The ECJ has now ruled that von der Leyen and her Commission failed to provide a “plausible explanation” for the disappearance of the texts and acted inappropriately by treating them as inconsequential. In doing so, the court upheld the New York Times’ right to access these records, recognizing that communications of this nature-conducted in the public interest and involving billions of taxpayer euros-must be subject to public scrutiny.

Von der Leyen’s fall from her self-fashioned pedestal is particularly jarring given how aggressively she has championed transparency. In her 2023 State of the European Union address, she warned about autocracies eroding democratic institutions from within and called for absolute openness. Going even further back, in 2019 she instructed all EU Commissioners to “be more........

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