Ursula von der Leyen didn’t wait for next week’s State of the Union address to kick off the political season ahead of the coming European elections.
Instead, it began at 11.24am Brussels time on Monday with an announcement that the European Commission is to review the conservation status of wolves. Rather than coming from the commissioner with responsibility for the environment and biodiversity, it bore the personal imprimatur of the commission president herself.
“The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans,” she declared in the statement, in which no one else was quoted. “I urge local and national authorities to take action where necessary.”
When von der Leyen personally associates herself with a particular policy – as she did on the drive to develop and procure of Covid-19 vaccines, for example – it’s a political move.
Her team is notorious within the commission for swooping in and taking charge of certain files, sometimes to the ire of officials who suddenly find themselves excluded from a policy that falls under their particular expertise.
The political context is that the pan-European group to which von der Leyen belongs, Fine Gael’s European People’s Party, has led calls to ease restrictions on the killing of some wildlife in a play for rural votes ahead of the 2024 elections.
After initially agreeing that the 2019-2024 parliamentary term would be the one to lock in the EU’s green transformation, the EPP then became spooked that they mustn’t seem “too green” and face losing votes to anti-green parties or the far right.
“It is about more than wolves,” as one official remarked in reaction to the commission announcement. “Wolves are becoming a major political weapon used by populists.”
Last year, the EPP demanded that more killings of wolves, bears, and lynxes should be allowed because their numbers have somewhat recovered from the point of near-eradication and they are now blamed for attacks on livestock.
At the time, I wrote that the scientific evidence indicates that the most effective way to reduce the predation of livestock is to protect flocks with fences, rather than by killing the predators, which only works until the next wolf comes along.
The commission has now invited interested parties to submit their most up-to-date information about wolves and their impact by September 22nd – an unusually short timeframe for a commission data-gathering exercise. A spokesman insisted that the outcome of the review would not be pre-judged.
When pressed however, the spokesman acknowledged that the “further flexibilities” mentioned in the announcement does mean allowing more culling of wolves, which is the demand of hunting and farming groups.
“Indeed we are more talking about going in the direction of what local communities are calling for, rather than the other way around,” commission environment spokesman Adalbert Jahnz said.
The timing of the announcement was curious in two ways.
Firstly, it was simultaneous to an announcement by the German government on the same issue – naturally a political environment to which von der Leyen is particularly attuned.
“The shooting of wolves after wolf attacks must be possible more quickly and with less bureaucracy,” Germany’s environment minister Steffi Lemke said in an interview on Monday.
Germany’s federal government had been under pressure to act after Bavaria moved to allow the easier killing of wolves in a “Bavarian Wolf Ordinance” (it passed an ordinance to allow the removal of otters from waterways on the same day).
Bavarian premier Markus Söder has positioned himself as an opponent of wolves, insisting that livestock should have the right to roam unfenced throughout the Alpine region without peril, and declaring that “the wolf does not belong here”.
The second curiosity in timing was, as several observers noted, that the announcement came almost a year to the day since von der Leyen’s pet pony Dolly was killed by a wolf.
The wolf, identified by the code number GW950m, was placed on a ”kill list” by authorities, but the order expired before he could be caught.
The day after the announcement, von der Leyen was in Kenya to attend the Africa Climate Summit. She made a speech praising the potential of Africa to be “part of the solution”, listing reasons including the continent’s “incredible nature and biodiversity”.
It served to again illustrate the low European tolerance for costs associated with accommodating nature, compared to the compromises that parts of the world that have destroyed less of their natural heritage are expected to make.