Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission that runs the EU is finally facing a long overdue no-confidence vote. Its chances of success, all observers agree, are very small. And yet, this is an important moment.

That’s because the single most powerful politician in the EU is not, for instance, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz or French President Emmanuel Macron (notwithstanding their own delusions of grandeur), but Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission. Because in NATO-EU Europe, the true measure of power now is the ability to spoil whatever sorry remnants of democracy are still standing. And in spite of very tough competition, von der Leyen is the worst, most corrupting spoiler of them all.

This is due to three facts. The first is structural: The EU was designed not to be a ‘democracy’ – however flawed – but one big, entrenched, and growing ‘democracy deficit’. Its purpose has never been to shaft the US, even if American President Donald Trump can’t stop whining about that. The EU’s real core function is to extinguish democracy in Europe by shifting genuine power from nation-states with some, if already meagre, popular participation in political decision-making to an unelected bureaucracy, of which the Commission is the center and top.

The second fact is a matter of individual character and hence responsibility: Ursula von der Leyen is the embodiment of an insatiable lust for personal, unaccountable power. She won’t admit it, of course, but her behavior speaks volumes: Von der Leyen does not see herself as a public servant but firmly believes that it is the public that must serve her.

Think of these two factors – the structural and the individual – if you wish, as broadly similar to what happened during the rise of Joseph Stalin in the former Soviet Union: Like the EU, the post-revolutionary Communist party was built to restrict political decision-making to a small and self-selecting group of true believers. And only those confessing the correct “values” were even offered a chance to join. Like von der Leyen, Stalin managed to turn this deliberately created “democracy deficit” to his own advantage by basing his personal despotism on it.

If you think that analogy is far-fetched, consider that in both cases, the rise of the Soviet despot and that of the European Commission president,........

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