BERLIN 6 Jul (ANA) - If the European parliament approves Ursula von der Leyen’s nomination in two weeks’ time, the German defence minister will make for an unusual European commission president: a consensus candidate who has won the approval of western liberals and eastern rightwingers, yet is proving divisive in her home country.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has praised the 60-year-old for having “the DNA of the European community”, while the conservative Polish newspaper Gazeta Polska has hailed her nomination as a “historic choice”. However, in Germany the prospect of a German filling the commission presidency for the first time in 52 years has been met with outcries across the political spectrum.

The former leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) Martin Schulz described Von der Leyen as “the government’s weakest minister”, while his SPD colleague Sigmar Gabriel, a former vice-chancellor, called her nomination “an unprecedented act of political trickery”.

The Greens bemoaned Von der Leyen’s nomination as an “old-school backroom deal”, the pro-business Free Democrats said she was “not the best candidate”, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland said her selection would amount to “cheating voters” and even Manfred Weber, the candidate that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union had originally fielded for the top commission post, lamented a “sad day for European democracy”.

Katarina Barley, a former SPD justice minister who is now one of the new European parliament’s vice-presidents, said she would vote against her former cabinet colleague – a move endorsed by leading German newspapers such as Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Von der Leyen was an “inappropriate” choice, the paper said, because her track record in the defence ministry was so poor that she should long ago have resigned. “She will be unable to cope with the commission presidency,” it added.(ANA)

FA/ANA/6 July 2019-------