European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who has just been re-elected for a five-year term, has held only one bilateral meeting with Harris, on the fringes of the Munich Security Conference in 2022, though the two have met at other international events.
In public, European politicians remain keen to stay positive.
“I wish all the best to Kamala Harris, she’s a woman, a strong woman, I wish her all the best,” Belgium’s Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib told reporters ahead of a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels Monday — the closest any European politician at the meeting got to an endorsement.
“I have seen Vice President Harris at each of her appearances at the Munich Security Conference and found her to be a very charismatic, intelligent and humorous woman who was clearly committed to her transatlantic beliefs,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent Christian Democrat lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee in Berlin.
They don’t say it aloud, but the critical question for many in the EU mainstream is not what Harris would be like in the White House, but whether she has what it takes to beat Trump to get there.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis paid tribute to President Biden in an interview with POLITICO Monday. He declined to comment on Harris’ probable nomination because the process is still ongoing. “Assuming she is the nominee, I think that it would be inappropriate for us Europeans to interfere in the US election,” he said, adding: “but it is certainly appropriate that we need to prepare for all eventualities.”
Jacopo Barigazzi, Barbara Moens, Clea Caulcutt, Laura Kayali, Nette Nöstlinger, Vincent Manancourt and Eugene Daniels contributed reporting.
