gotchanewsdaily.com 
“She will be even more in control of everything,” said one EU official who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Who thought that was even possible?”
It was the culmination of months of public and private strategy to remove the dissenting voices of her first term as European Commission president. From the first team, none of the naysayers remain. Big personalities such as France’s Thierry Breton and the Netherlands’ Frans Timmermans are now gone.
During her first term — in which she faced a global pandemic and a war on the EU’s doorstep — she developed a reputation for making unilateral decisions, overstepping her job description, cutting other EU leaders out of the decision-making, and speaking only to a handful of advisers. As a result, she gained the nickname Queen Ursula in Brussels.
The morning of von der Leyen’s announcement of her second top team, she refused to tell the European Parliament, her partners in the process of approving commissioners, who she was assigning to which job. Instead, she left a meeting with the Parliament’s top leaders and went straight into a press conference in which she revealed all the details. She was later accused of “contempt” for the Parliament.
Hours before, she convinced the French she would give their commissioner nominee an exceptionally important job if they swapped out Breton. On Tuesday, as she revealed job descriptions, they realized they’d been bamboozled into a watered-down position.
“Anyone who thought that she could have changed her style, her will to keep tight control, was at the very least naive,” said an EU diplomat.
