GERMANY’S Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman in history to head the European Commission, is a loyal confidante of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, most recently serving in the tough post of defense minister.

The political blue-blood, trained medical doctor and mother of seven was long considered a likely successor to Merkel but had seen her domestic political star fade in recent years.

A relatively unknown name in European politics, the ambitious 60-year-old now looks headed for Brussels after emerging as the surprise winner from weeks of European backroom deal-making and power plays.

Crucially, she has the backing of French President Emmanuel Macron, who appreciates her cooperation on Franco-German defense issues at a time of growing rifts between Berlin and Paris.

Brussels-born, fluent in French and English, and with a degree from the London School of Economics, she has cultivated a network of contacts in Europe and across the Atlantic.

A strong proponent of greater German engagement on the world stage and closer EU integration, she has in the past advocated a “United States of Europe.”

A life-long high achiever, von der Leyen has perhaps drawn the most animosity for her best-in-class style, the persona of a super-mom with iron discipline and a perfect hairdo that some voters find unnerving.

She was born as Ursula Gertrud Albrecht on Oct. 8, 1958 in Brussels, where her father Ernst Albrecht worked as a senior European Commission official, and lived there until age 13.

As the daughter of Albrecht, who went on to become Christian Democratic Union (CDU) state premier of Lower Saxony, she spent her late teenage years under police protection at a time when far-left extremists were targeting political and business figures.

The threat forced her to move to London to live in an uncle’s flat under the assumed name of “Rose Ladson,” and kept a security detail at her side well into adulthood.

A top-grade student, she studied first economics then medicine, going on to work in a women’s clinic.

She interrupted her career to be a housewife when her husband, a professor of medicine, won a scholarship to Stanford.

Then she joined the CDU at age 32 and entered the Lower Saxony parliament, going on to win her first Bundestag seat in 2009.

Von der Leyen has remained an outsider in the traditionally conservative and male-dominated CDU.

In a rare political gamble, she broke party ranks in 2013 to push for a women’s quota in corporate boardrooms.

She once advocated that police team up with Internet service providers to block child pornography — a plan critics charged would create an online system of censorship, or “Zensur” in German, earning her the nickname “Zensursula.” The plan was ultimately repealed.

Like several other German politicians, she has faced accusations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation, but survived politically when no serious misconduct was found.

Von der Leyen is the only Merkel Cabinet member to have been there since the beginning in 2005, having run first the family affairs and then the labor ministry.

In contrast to many of her colleagues in the government, von der Leyen speaks English and French fluently and has always acted with self-confidence on the international stage.

In several governments led by Merkel, von der Leyen tackled her new task with great dedication, calling existing structures into question and eventually stirring them up. Occasionally, her determination even produced irritation among her parliamentary party colleagues.

When she became the minister for family affairs and youth in 2005, she took on the more conservative wing of her CDU party by pushing for a huge expansion of daycare spaces, and introducing Germany’s paid parental leave scheme, which includes at least two months of paid leave for fathers.

After she became minister of labor and social affairs in 2009, von der Leyen forced Merkel to drop her opposition to boardroom quotas for women — though the measure that would have imposed such quotas was defeated in the German parliament.

In 2013, she became Germany’s first female defense minister, a notoriously difficult portfolio given post-war Germany’s touchy relationship with military affairs and frequent defense equipment failures.

During her term, Germany has deployed troops in missions from Afghanistan to Mali while drawing frequent political fire from U.S. President Donald Trump for what he considers Berlin’s insufficient military spending.

In the tough post, von der Leyen has weathered scandals over far-right extremists within the army, controversial contracts with business consultancies and cost over-runs, including for the renovation of a vintage naval vessel.

She was once dubbed “the soloist” for her go-it-alone style, and a recent poll by Bild am Sonntag newspaper rated her as the second-least popular member of Merkel’s Cabinet. The transport minister recently took her place at the bottom thanks to a failed autobahn toll program.

It was in her role as German defense minister that von der Leyen became especially unpopular.

Under her, the ministry broke procurement rules in the way it awarded contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to outside consultants such as McKinsey; a parliamentary investigation is still under way.

The German army and air force’s equipment remains barely fit for purpose, despite her attempts at modernization. Repairs on a naval training ship ballooned from under €10 million (US$11.3 million) to €130 million. And, during scandals over sexual harassment and radical right wingers in the army, she faced calls to resign after saying officers had an “attitude problem,” rather than accepting responsibility herself.

As a result, there’s been a less-than-complimentary reaction back home to her nomination for the commission presidency. One unnamed lawmaker from her party told the Financial Times that it was “good for the army that she’s going [as] her years as minister have been really hard for the armed forces.”

Martin Schulz, a former European Parliament president and a prominent member of the Social Democrats (SPD) — Merkel’s junior coalition partners — said von der Leyen was the country’s “weakest minister,” adding: “Apparently such a performance suffices to become head of the commission.”

Nonetheless, von der Leyen does tick quite a few boxes as far as Europe’s leaders are concerned.

For a start, she was born and raised in Brussels, the EU’s base. She is a federalist with a history of advocating ever-closer ties between EU member states, and she once called Brexit “a burst bubble of hollow promises.”

But perhaps most importantly, hers was a name on which the national leaders could agree.

The next European Commission president was supposed to be the second after Juncker to be nominated under the so-called Spitzenkandidat (lead candidate) process — the various transnational blocs in the European Parliament each campaigned for the May parliamentary elections with a top candidate as their figurehead, and the next commission president should have been one of those figureheads. But when it came to the crunch, the national leaders couldn’t agree on any of the lead candidates becoming president.

So on Tuesday, von der Leyen’s name was proposed, reportedly by Macron, as a compromise, and the national leaders struck their deal: Germany’s von der Leyen would get the commission presidency, France’s Christine Lagarde would head up the European Central Bank, Belgium’s Charles Michel would become the new president of the council (the body representing national governments) and Spain’s Josep Borrell would become the EU’s head of foreign affairs.

Asked whether von der Leyen was a good choice to succeed Juncker, Green’s defense expert Omid Nouripour quipped about the many recent Bundeswehr failings making headlines in Germany: “The situation with respect to the equipment of the German armed forces is not a necessary qualification for the top EU executive job.”

Sigmar Gabriel, a former SPD leader and still a party big wig, described von der Leyen’s elevation as an “unprecedented act of political trickery” and said it might be reason for the party to leave the German Government.

Nonetheless, von der Leyen set up a new, verified Twitter account Wednesday to reflect her new role as presidential candidate. “Hallo Europa! Hello Europe! Salut l’Europe!” read the account’s first tweet.(SD-Agencies)