Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen (née Albrecht; born 8 October 1958) is a German politician and physician who has served as 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 for 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.
Von der Leyen was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, to German parents. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the first European civil servants. She was brought up bilingually in German and French, and moved to Germany in 1971 when her father became involved in German politics. She graduated from the London School of Economics in 1978, and in 1987, she acquired her medical licence from Hanover Medical School. After marrying fellow physician Heiko von der Leyen, she lived for four years in the United States with her family in the 1990s. After returning to Germany she became involved in local politics in the Hanover region in the late 1990s, and she served as a cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Saxony from 2003 to 2005.
In 2005, von der Leyen joined the federal cabinet, first as Minister for Family Affairs and Youth from 2005 to 2009, then taking on the role of Minister for Labour and Social Affairs from 2009 to 2013, and finally serving as Minister for Defence from 2013 to 2019, the first woman to do so. When she left office, she was the only minister to have served continuously in Merkel's cabinet since Merkel became chancellor. She served as a deputy leader of the CDU from 2010 to 2019, and was regarded as a leading contender to succeed Merkel as the chancellor of Germany and as the favourite to become the secretary general of NATO after Jens Stoltenberg. British defence secretary Michael Fallon described her in 2019 as "a star presence" in the NATO community and "the doyenne of NATO ministers for over five years". In 2023, she was again regarded as the favourite to take the role.
On 2 July 2019, von der Leyen was proposed by the European Council as the candidate for president of the European Commission. She was then elected by the European Parliament on 16 July; she took office on 1 December, becoming the first woman to hold the office. Her tenure has been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Green Deal, the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as American threats to annex Greenland. In November 2022 she announced that her commission would work to establish an International Criminal Tribunal for the Russian Federation. The EU–US Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade, announced in August 2025, exposed her to criticism from France and Germany.
On 18 July 2024, von der Leyen was re-elected as Commission President by the European Parliament with an absolute majority of 401 members of the European Parliament out of 720; strengthened by around 30 votes compared to her election in 2019. She was named the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Von der Leyen was born in 1958 in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, where she lived until she was 13 years old.
In 1971, she relocated to Sehnde in the Hanover region after her father had become CEO of the food company Bahlsen and involved in state politics in Lower Saxony.
In 1986, she married physician Heiko von der Leyen, a member of the von der Leyen family, which belonged to the German nobility and made its fortune as silk merchants. They have seven children, born between 1987 and 1999. Von der Leyen is Lutheran.
She lives with her family on a farm in Burgdorf near Hanover where they keep horses. She is a keen equestrian and has been involved in competitive horseriding.
Education and professional career
Von der Leyen moved to the Hanover Region in 1971 when her father entered politics to become minister-president of the state of Lower Saxony in 1976. In 1977, she started studying economics at the University of Göttingen. At the height of the fear of communist terrorism in West Germany, she fled to London in 1978 after her family was told that the Red Army Faction (RAF) was planning to kidnap her due to her being the daughter of a prominent politician. She spent more than a year in hiding in London, where she lived with protection from Scotland Yard under the name Rose Ladson to avoid detection and enrolled at the London School of Economics. A German diminutive of Rose, Röschen, had been her nickname since childhood, while Ladson was the name of her American great-grandmother's family, originally from Northamptonshire, who immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina in 1679, became wealthy landowners and slave traders of the Planter class, related to families of governors of the Province of Carolina. She said that she "lived more than she studied", and that London was "the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything" which "gave me an inner freedom that I have kept till today". She returned to Germany in 1979 but lived with a security detail at her side for several years.
In 1980, after three years of studying economics, she switched to medicine with a specialisation in gynaecology, at the Hannover Medical School, where she obtained her medical licence as a physician.
From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she defended the thesis and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University, returning to Germany in 1996.
From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hanover Medical School. In 2001, she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.
In 2015, researchers collaborating at the VroniPlag Wiki reviewed von der Leyen's 1991 doctoral dissertation and alleged that 43.5% of the thesis pages contained plagiarism and in 23 cases citations were used that did not verify claims for which they were given. Multiple notable German academics such as Gerhard Dannemann and Volker Rieble publicly accused von der Leyen of intended plagiarism. The Hannover Medical School conducted an investigation and concluded in March 2016 that while the thesis contains plagiarism, no intention to deceive could be proven.
The university decided not to revoke von der Leyen's medical degree. Critics questioned the independence of the commission that reviewed the thesis as von der Leyen personally knew its director from joint work for an alumni association. Various media outlets also criticised the decision for being non-transparent, not according to established rules, and failing to secure high academic standards.
Ursula von der Leyen joined the CDU in 1990, and became active in local politics in Lower Saxony in 1996, shortly after she had returned to Germany after living in California. She was a member of the committee on social policy of CDU in Lower Saxony from 1996, and also became active in the association of medical doctors in the CDU party.
In the Lower Saxony Landtag, 2003–2005