The European Union’s top official is struggling.
National governments are reasserting their power, the coronavirus is exposing the EU’s old fault lines with a new ferocity and, six months into the job, some officials who work with Ursula von der Leyen are asking whether she’s up to it.
In the past two months, the president of the European Commission has been scolded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, provoked diplomatic outrage by deriding calls for joint debt issuance and apologized to Italy after the executive’s emergency mechanism failed to rally aid from other member states as it was supposed to.
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