Ursula von der Leyen

Born in Brussels in 1958 to a father who was among the first European civil servants, she grew up bilingual and moved to Germany at 13 when her father entered politics. She studied at the London School of Economics, earned her medical licence in 1987, and spent four years in the U.S. in the 1990s with her husband and children. By the late 1990s she'd entered local politics in Hanover, rising to Lower Saxony's state cabinet in 2003. In 2005 she joined Merkel's federal government - Family Affairs, then Labour, then Defence in 2013, the first woman to hold that post - and became a fixture in NATO councils, where the British defence secretary called her "a star presence." On 2 July 2020, the European Council tapped her for the Commission presidency; she won the Parliament vote two weeks later and took office that December, the first woman to lead the institution. She was re-elected in July 2024 with a stronger majority than her first round.