Ursula von der Leyen’s perma-smile is morphing into a rictus grin.

2025 could have been the year the six-year Commission president made her long-held ambition to make the EU a geopolitical powerhouse a reality.

Instead, as this week’s failure to tap Russian assets for Ukraine showed, the EU will enter the new year cowed by big powers, and more divided than ever by its own internal far-right forces, who have been needlessly emboldened.

It could have been different.

Von der Leyen took her pliant commissioners to India in February, declaring an ambition to strike a trade deal by the year’s end. She planned to close the historic Mercosur agreement in Brazil on Saturday. In the end, both ended up postponed.

The Commission president also spent months defending a one-sided US trade deal while denying it had anything to do with trying to keep Trump committed to Ukraine. If that really was her aim, the latest signals from the White House towards Kyiv suggest it didn’t work.

Von der Leyen’s rigid control of the Berlaymont and the Commission’s communications weapons backfired in a botched proposal of the EU’s next budget. It is already being savaged by regions, capitals, MEPs, and potato-wielding farmers.

Make no mistake: she sought out this responsibility for herself, charging ahead amid Europe’s weak national leadership, riding roughshod over her fellow EU institutions, aided and abetted by her centre-right political family, which dominates key posts in Brussels.

With Europe’s national leaders weak and distracted, von der Leyen busied herself with turning the bloc away from its foundation as an economic entity, into one with defence capacities – only to be repeatedly slapped down by national leaders. While she is busy on foreign policy, she has ordered large swathes of the Commission to unstitch the very policies she devised during her first term.

“Europe is in a fight,” she declared in September. That’s right – and it’s losing.

Mercosur: the EU’s New Year’s resolution for 2026

Von der Leyen told EU leaders on Thursday that the signing of the controversial trade deal between the EU and the South American Mercosur bloc will be postponed until January. Again.

She was due to fly to Brazil on Saturday, but the delay now spares Brussels the inconvenience of resolving a 25-year-old trade dispute just before the holidays.

For a pact so long in the making, there is little here that is genuinely new. Mercosur slipped in 2019, again in 2023, and repeatedly through 2024. There is always another technical fix to negotiate, another constituency to placate. Time, in this case, has added more footnotes rather than momentum.

The postponement came despite a last-minute effort by the European Parliament and the Council to agree on a package of safeguards to shield the agricultural sector, with measures covering “sensitive” products such as poultry, beef, rice, honey, eggs, garlic, and sugar.

That did little to reassure farmers, who took to the streets of the EU quarter on Thursday. Outside the Parliament, protesters on tractors lit flares and hurled potatoes – a product, notably, not deemed “sensitive” under the new safeguards.

Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had only just vowed to push “intensively” for a year-end signature, before discovering the limits of German influence when Paris and Rome team up and decide the political cost remains too high.

France has long been opposed to the deal, but Italy, which remained a wild card until Wednesday, shifted the balance. During a call with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Giorgia Meloni asked for “patience” and extra time to secure support from farmers.

The deal is now expected to be signed on 12 January in Paraguay. For now, it only joins a familiar category in Brussels: too important to abandon, too politically complicated to conclude.

https://www.euractiv.com/opinion/the-brief-ursula-von-der-leyens-annus-horribilis/

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EU bans Belgian newspaper

BY Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Associations, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

Apparently, the EU’s authoritarian tendencies are beginning to affect its own media outlets. Recently, the European Commission banned the Euractiv correspondents from its special meetings in Brussels. This comes after Euractiv journalists expressed critical opinions about the EU, proving the advanced levels of censorship and violation of press freedom in contemporary Europe.

The Brussels-based Euractiv was one of the major outlets authorized to attend European Commission briefings and unofficial meetings – a status difficult to obtain, usually dependent on the personal support of some EU bureaucrat for the requesting newspaper. There is something called “access journalism” in the EU, a press culture in which newspapers supported by politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats gain access to European Commission “informal” meetings to obtain privileged information and report it in the press as propaganda for their sponsoring partners. Euractiv was until now one of these outlets that traditionally had access to important Commission meetings.

However, Euractiv has apparently displeased a large number of bureaucrats in Brussels. Recently, the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Karnitschnig, announced that Euractiv journalists are banned from the European Commission. According to him, the outlet was banned due to the critical opinion that it has recently begun to express against what he called the “EU bubble” – referring to the elite of leading European politicians and officials. Karnitschnig described Euractiv’s work as “independent journalism” and stated that this type of work is “endangered” in present-day Europe.

The editor stated that he doesn’t know for sure the specific reason for the ban, but suspects it was the outlet’s coverage of the lies spread by the Commission about an alleged “Russian attack” against Ursula von der Leyen’s plane in September. At the time, the Commission and its associated newspapers accused Moscow of launching a cyber and electronic attack against von der Leyen’s plane, forcing the flight crew to use “paper maps” to land in Bulgaria and avoid an accident. Euractiv disagreed with this narrative and published articles contradicting the official arguments, which may have contributed to its ban.

However, this was not the only time Euractiv criticized von der Leyen and her journalist partners. They also exposed in detail the European Commission’s plan to create a common European intelligence service, severely criticizing the initiative. Apparently, these critical stances on the European Commission’s main agendas were seen as a “threat” by local liberal elites, resulting in the end of Euractiv correspondents’ access to special meetings between von der Leyen and her advisors with journalists.

“In fact, it has become an endangered species (…) At the beginning of this year, we set about infusing the ‘EU bubble’ with a heavy dose of critical journalism (…) Not all recipients reacted well, least of all the Commission, which recently banned us from its background briefings – the off-the-record sessions during which President Ursula von der Leyen’s advisers seek to steer the message they’re trying to send on any given issue to the press (…) Maybe it was our debunking of the legend pushed by the Commission that von der Leyen’s pilots were forced to resort to “paper maps” to land her plane in Bulgaria amid a purported Russian attack… Or was it that we lambasted her absurd plan for a European intelligence service?,” he said.

In fact, this is just further proof of how the EU has become averse to the idea of ​​freedom of expression, thus violating its own classic European values. In practice, Brussels has become authoritarian not only against alternative, dissident and foreign media outlets, but also against the European media itself. Simply disagreeing with any point in the official narratives of the European Commission is enough for a newspaper to immediately be added to the bloc’s “enemies list”.

Actually, this was already expected, considering how difficult it is to set limits to authoritarianism. When the European bloc began banning Russian and pro-Russian media, a dangerous precedent was set for subsequent dictatorial measures. Now, having no more Russian, foreign, or opposition press to censor, the EU is beginning to ban its own journalists who criticize or disagree even slightly with some of the bloc’s positions.

If the EU truly wants to defend European values, it will need to immediately reverse these authoritarian measures. It is necessary to restore respect for freedom of opinion and press, guaranteeing journalists and media outlets the right to disagree with the bloc’s official narratives. Similarly, it is necessary to extinguish the lobbying culture that characterizes so-called “access journalism,” giving all newspapers the freedom to access what is said in Commission meetings, regardless of support from lobbying groups and bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, however, the EU does not seem interested in respecting classic European values, only in advocating for the selfish interests of the transnational elites that control it.

https://vtforeignpolicy.com/2025/12/eu-bans-belgian-newspaper/

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.