Ursula von der Leyen hasn’t won the hearts and minds of EU citizens — if they know her at all.
In a POLITICO poll conducted by pollster Public First across three major EU countries, only about one in five German and Spanish respondents said the Commission president was doing a good job; in France, just 12% said the same.
Nearly one in three respondents in Spain and France, and 45% in Germany, said von der Leyen was doing a bad job. The poor performance review in von der Leyen’s homeland was largely driven by people who said they’d vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, with more than half of those voters saying she was doing a “very bad” job.
In France and Spain, far more people said they didn’t consider her performance either good or bad; rather, they either had no opinion one way or the other or had never even heard of her.
More than one in five French respondents said they didn’t know who von der Leyen was, compared with 10% in Spain and just 5% in Germany.