EU watchdog says von der Leyen should have kept Macron’s Mercosur text message

PARIS — The EU’s transparency watchdog has accused the Commission of maladministration after failing to keep a text message from French President Emmanuel Macron to Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU executive, urging a freeze in talks on a major trade deal with Latin America.

Macron’s text message in early 2024, exclusively reported by POLITICO, sought to halt talks on the trade accord with the Mercosur bloc within sight of the finish line. The deal was only approved at the beginning of this year by a qualified majority of EU member countries — and against the resistance of a French-led minority. It finally entered provisional force on May 1.

More broadly, in a recommendation published on Friday, EU Ombudsman Teresa Anjinho said von der Leyen and other EU commissioners should keep all text messages with heads of state and government, including those that automatically delete.

The recommendation comes as part of a probe which originated after POLITICO reported on Jan. 30, 2024, that Macron had privately texted von der Leyen in an attempt to derail the trade deal between the EU and Mercosur, a trade bloc grouping Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The watchdog launched the probe last September after Follow the Money journalist Alexander Fanta requested access to the message. The Commission acknowledged the existence of the message but said it had been automatically deleted as the “disappearing messages” feature of the Signal app was activated.

The ombudswoman said that, in future, “the Commission should ensure that all text and instant messages relating to the Commission’s policies, activities and decisions exchanged between Heads of State or Government, or ministers, and Members of the Commission, including those subject to automatic deletion after a certain time interval, are duly preserved for a reasonable period.”

The watchdog also criticized the Commission for taking 15 months before responding to the request to access the text message and said it could not rule out that the Commission might have deleted the message after receiving the request for access.

“The way the Commission handled the complainant’s public access request constituted maladministration,” Anjinho wrote.

Regrets

In a statement to POLITICO, European Commission spokesperson Balazs Ujvari stressed that the maladministration allegation only covered the delay in responding to request and not the fact of not keeping the message.

“The Commission regrets the fact that Mr. Fanta has not received an initial reply. This was due to an administrative oversight. Not every administrative oversight automatically constitutes maladministration,” Uivari said. 

While promising that the Commission will “carefully analyse” the ombudsman’s findings, Ujvari pointed out that “the President of the Commission and the Heads of State and Government need to have the possibility to exchange in an atmosphere of mutual trust and confidentiality, which enables fluidity of exchanges.” 

Von der Leyen’s handling of text messages has already come under scrutiny.

In May last year, an EU court found that the European Commission had been wrong to refuse access to von der Leyen’s text messages with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In that case, the European Commission also reviewed the texts in question before allowing them to be lost.

This article has been updated with comment from the Commission.