Markus Pieper is a German politician and member of the European Parliament for Germany. He is a member of the Christian Democratic Union, part of the European People's Party.
Elisa Maria da Costa Guimarães Ferreira, GCC is a Portuguese politician and economist who has been serving as European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms in the administration of President Ursula von der Leyen since 2019. She previously served as vice-governor of the Bank of Portugal from 2016 until 2019. She was as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Socialist Party; part of the Party of European Socialists between 2004 and 2016. In 2019, she was selected by Portugal to serve as a European Commissioner. Previously, she was in charge of the Ministries of Environment (1995-1999) and Public Works (1999-2001) during the governments of António Guterres.
Margrethe Vestager is a Danish politician currently serving as Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age since December 2019 and European Commissioner for Competition since 2014. Vestager is a member of the Danish Social Liberal Party, and of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) on the European level.
Relations between the European Union (EU) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) or Sino–European relations are bilateral relations that were established in 1975 between the PRC and the European Community. The EU is the PRC's largest trading partner, and the PRC is the EU's largest trade partner.
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German politician, serving as the 13th president of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as federal minister of defence. She is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its affiliated European political party, the European People's Party (EPP). On 7 March 2024, the EPP elected her as its Spitzenkandidat to lead the campaign for the 2024 European Parliament elections. She was re-elected to head the Commission in July 2024.
Mario Draghi is an Italian economist, academic, banker, statesman and civil servant who served as the prime minister of Italy from February 2021 to October 2022. Prior to his appointment as prime minister, he served as President of the European Central Bank (ECB) between 2011 and 2019. Draghi was also Chair of the Financial Stability Board between 2009 and 2011, and Governor of the Bank of Italy between 2006 and 2011.
Adina-Ioana Vălean is a Romanian politician who has been serving as European Commissioner for Transport under the leadership of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen from 2019 until June 2024. She served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2007 until 2019, where she chaired of the European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy in 2019. In the 2024 European elections she was again elected and became a member of the European Parliament.
Heiko Echter von der Leyen is a German physician. He was born into the von der Leyen family in Hanover, which belonged to the German nobility. Von der Leyen is married to Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission since 2019.
Gunnar Beck is a German academic, lawyer and sometime politician. He served as deputy legal adviser (EU) at the House of Commons in London from 2002 to 2010 and as legal adviser to the UK parliamentary delegation to the Convention on the Future of Europe from 2002 to 2004. From 2014 to 2019 he was a part-time legal and EU affairs adviser to the Alternative for Germany from 2014 to 2019 and then a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 and 2024. From 2022 to May 2024 he held the position of vice-president of the Identity & Democracy Group. He has been a reader in EU law at the SOAS, University of London since 2005 and a door tenant and practicing barrister at 1EC Chambers from 2013. Beck has both won wider public and academic acclaim, and provoked fierce criticism in response to, his work on the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice, the legal and political aspects of the euro and migration crises and on 18th/19th century German moral and legal philosophy, especially the works of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
The von der Leyen Commission is the current European Commission, in office since 1 December 2019 and is to last until the formation of the forthcoming Second Von der Leyen Commission. It consists of one commissioner from each of the member states of the European Union – including Ursula von der Leyen, its president, who is from Germany.
The 2024 European Parliament election was held in the European Union (EU) between 6 and 9 June 2024. It was the tenth parliamentary election since the first direct elections in 1979, and the first European Parliament election after Brexit. A total of 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were elected to represent more than 450 million people from 27 member states. This election also coincided with a number of other elections in some European Union member states.
The tenth European Parliament was elected during the 2024 elections and is slated to remain in session until the forthcoming 2029 elections.
The Conference on the Future of Europe was a proposal of the European Commission and the European Parliament, announced at the end of 2019, with the aim of looking at the medium- to long-term future of the EU and what reforms should be made to its policies and institutions. It is intended that the Conference should involve citizens, including a significant role for young people, civil society, and European institutions as equal partners and last for two years. It will be jointly organised by the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission. On 19 April 2021, the multilingual digital platform of the Conference futureu.europa.eu was launched.
The European Green Deal, approved in 2020, is a set of policy initiatives by the European Commission with the overarching aim of making the European Union (EU) climate neutral in 2050. The plan is to review each existing law on its climate merits, and also introduce new legislation on the circular economy (CE), building renovation, biodiversity, farming and innovation.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its spread in Europe has had significant effects on some major EU member countries and on European Union institutions, especially in the areas of finance, civil liberties, and relations between member states.
Sofagate is a diplomatic protocol incident that happened during the visit of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and President of the European Council Charles Michel to Turkey in April 2021. When Michel and von der Leyen were to meet with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, there were only two chairs and two sofas in the room in which they were received. Michel then seated himself in the chair beside Erdoğan while von der Leyen was offered to take a seat on a sofa in the same room across the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. Michel as a man took the more prominent position than von der Leyen as a woman, despite both having the title President. Many commentators described the incident as sexist, as did von der Leyen herself. Later on, Çavuşoğlu called the accusations against Turkey "unfair", saying that the seating arrangement was made in accordance with the requests of the European side and added protocol officials always "meet and discuss the arrangement before each visit."
The Trade and Technology Council (TTC) is a transatlantic political body which serves as a diplomatic forum to coordinate technology and trade policy between the United States and European Union. It is composed of ten working groups, each focusing on specific policy areas. The formation of the TTC was first announced by US President Joe Biden and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on June 15, 2021. The early agenda focused primarily on US-EU cooperation in technology, strategic sectors, market access, trade, democratic values and rule of law in the digital world, supply chain resilience, the global trade order and the EU's developing regulatory agenda like Digital Services Act, Data Act and Cloud Rules. The TTC was established under the leadership of five co-chairs – European Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, European Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai.
Bjoern Seibert is a German politician who is the current Head of Cabinet for Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. He's worked with von der Leyen since she was Defence Minister of Germany.
Pfizergate refers to a scandal involving European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer over the procurement of COVID-19 vaccines. The controversy centers on the lack of transparency in the communication and negotiation processes for purchasing a significant number of vaccine doses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Second von der Leyen Commission will be the European Commission that will run through 2029. It will consist of one commissioner from each of the member states of the European Union – including Ursula von der Leyen, its president-designate, who is from Germany.
