He’s known as the man to call to get things done in Brussels. He leans on party bosses to exert his sway over the European Parliament. And he manages the European Commission, an institution of 32,000 employees, like an extension of his brain, watching over everything from social media posts to mid-level staff appointments.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s right-hand man, Bjoern Seibert, is the ultimate behind-the-scenes Brussels power broker.
Never heard of him? That’s exactly how he likes it.
At von der Leyen’s side for about a decade, the soft-spoken 45-year-old has built up a reputation as a tireless worker, astute political strategist and ruthlessly efficient operator who delivers on promises.
For top officials in Paris, Berlin and Washington, it’s a dream come true. Finally, they have someone who can pick up the phone and deliver, a huge asset at a time when Europe was being buffeted by crises.
“He is incredibly influential,” said Phil Gordon, former national security adviser to Kamala Harris when she was U.S. vice president. “No one was seen as better understanding the EU and how to get things done.”
Others agree, praising Seibert as “very clever” and a “strategic thinker.”
“He is the most powerful official in Brussels by some distance,” said Mujtaba Rahman, head of Europe at the Eurasia Group, a think tank.
Overmighty adjutant
More comfortable behind the scenes than in the limelight, Seibert is intensely private. Publicly known facts about him include that he is married with two children and works incredibly long hours. That’s about it.
But as he embarks on his second five-year term as von der Leyen’s head of Cabinet, Seibert — at times referred to as the Commission’s unofficial “co-president” — faces increasing criticism from those who think his power has grown too large.
In an interview with POLITICO in early June, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier lamented what he called an “authoritarian drift” in Brussels under von der Leyen and her “powerful chief of staff.” That chimes with what six current and former Commission staffers told POLITICO, namely that Seibert’s insistence on signing off on everything from the public speaking points of his commissioners to the the names of individual Cabinet picks leads to bottlenecks, delays and demoralization.
Another effect is fear. Out of the 25 EU officials, diplomats, lawmakers and experts in total we spoke to for this article, just three agreed to speak on the record and only one of those voiced any criticism. Several people cited fear of professional reprisals as their reason for wanting to remain anonymous.
Others say his German conservative leanings are overbearing in a town that is already preponderantly German and conservative. They point to when Seibert insisted on backing a German conservative for a top EU business envoy post, only to see the appointment lead to a major political backlash.
Still others point to his close working relationship with the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, which they say became a liability after Donald Trump’s election.
“He derived a lot of his power from his direct line to the White House,” said a former Commission official. “That’s not the case anymore with Trump. Everything needs to be rebuilt.”
A Commission official pushed back on this characterization, underscoring regular continuing contacts with the White House.
A spokesperson for the Commission declined to comment for this piece. Seibert himself declined to be interviewed.
Other Commission officials pushed back against criticism saying he has generous time for debate — amounting to hundreds of hours, according to a tally shared with POLITICO — and that centralization has made the EU far more efficient. Bottlenecks and delays, Seibert’s defenders argue, are partly due to staffers seeking input on files where more senior direction is not necessarily warranted.
But this account is disputed by others who say that only Seibert and von der Leyen can be held responsible for a system they have created. “This Commission is very hierarchical with nothing passing Bjoern without his consent,” said Bas Eickhout, co-chair of the Greens group in the European Parliament.
Indeed, Seibert isn’t the first EU civil servant to prompt fear and fascination in Brussels. Before him, there was Martin Selmayr, another German who held sway under ex-President Jean-Claude Juncker and was known as the “Monster of the Berlaymont.”
But most people agreed Seibert is now the more formidable figure — a merciless T-1000 liquid metal Terminator versus the laconic, clunkier older generation T-800 model played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“He’s far more powerful today than Selmayr ever was,” said a former French government official.
I don’t remember anything
Anyone seeking insight into Seibert from his personal history is in for disappointment: Little from his youth has filtered into the public domain, and a Wikipedia entry offers as many clues as a broken Babylonian tablet.
In person, Seibert is a discreet if physically imposing figure — tall, a speaker of perfect English with traces of dry humor, he can be spotted in the vicinity of his boss, wearing New Balance sneakers and clutching a packet of files. He’s quieter than Selmayr, but also wields a bigger stick: One Commission official described him as a “quiet killer.”
Seibert graduated with a degree in social science from Erfurt University in the eastern German state of Thuringia in 2005, per the university, then went on to pursue a string of research fellowships at U.S. academic institutions including MIT focusing mostly on defense and security.
Upon his return to Germany, he moved to the German defense ministry where he initially worked at the politics department, according to a former colleague, who also said he impressed colleagues by going against Bundeswehr orthodoxy. At the time, his ability to work seemingly inhumane hours made an impression — and helped win him promotion to the office of von der Leyen, who was then defense minister.
That was the beginning of the “Bjoern and Ursula” double act that would come to rule over Brussels.
An episode from 2019, after von der Leyen had been picked by EU leaders to be the next head of the Commission, reveals a key ingredient in their partnership.
Seibert had been called upon to testify in front of an investigative committee of the German parliament looking into how lucrative contracts from the defense ministry while von der Leyen was in charge were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight, and whether a network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals.
At the center of the committee’s investigations was Katrin Suder, a former McKinsey consultant who became von der Leyen’s deputy in charge of the defense ministry’s arms department. In 2014, she brought Seibert into her department, quickly promoted him to be her chief of staff and later recommended him to do the same job for their common boss, von der Leyen.
His performance before the investigative committee would have pleased the most demanding of mafia bosses.
“Seibert declared in an endless loop that he could not remember anything, absolutely nothing,” according to a German media account of his performance from the time.
‘His responsibility’
Seibert’s loyalty would soon be tested again.
After von der Leyen won the nod from EU leaders to become Commission president, she needed a two-thirds majority in the European Parliament to be confirmed in the role. Normally, the task of cobbling together a majority would fall to Manfred Weber, a powerful German conservative who oversees the umbrella group of center-right European parties.
But Weber was licking his wounds from having been passed up for the top EU job in favor of von der Leyen. So the task fell to Seibert who, despite having no experience as a political operator, managed to pull off a nine-vote majority for von der Leyen by reaching outside the normal circle of so-called governing parties to the right-wing populists.
It was thanks to Seibert’s “significant contribution” that von der Leyen was confirmed, a German colleague said at the time.
Once installed at the Commission, the pair faced a wall of skepticism. “When the Commission started there was lots of skepticism about whether von der Leyen and Bjoern would be able to control the institution, as they didn’t know how it worked,” a former French official said. “They disproved this within days.”
Seibert, in particular, impressed counterparts. “He was exceptionally well-prepared,” the same official said. “He would always show he knew exactly what was going on in French politics. It was clear that this was someone you could trust, but who is also about control, about power.”
Working in a tight unit with a small cadre of mainly German-speaking advisers, von der Leyen and Seibert used the Covid-19 pandemic to consolidate power.
When the time came to negotiate vaccine contracts, they split the work among several sections of the Commission, giving Single Market Commissioner Thierry Breton oversight of vaccine supply chains.
But the negotiation of contracts itself was given to Sandra Gallina, a senior health official in the Commission. In reality, according to two former Commission officials, it was Seibert and von der Leyen who steered negotiations, culminating in the president’s December 2020 announcement of a deal to buy millions of doses of vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech. The New York Times reported that this deal came after an exchange of text messages between von der Leyen and Pfizer’s chief executive.
The Commission denies that the text messages contained anything substantive relating to negotiations.
In the ensuing “Pfizergate” scandal, von der Leyen faced criticism — and a judgment from the
Court of Justice of the European Union — for having failed to conserve the messages. But some of that criticism should have been directed at Seibert, the former officials said.
“It was his responsibility,” said one of the two ex-officials. “He is the reason for monumental mistakes committed by his president.”
A spokesperson for the Commission declined to comment.
Loyal to a fault
Loyalty would once again come into play in the final months of von der Leyen and Seibert’s first Commission term.
As von der Leyen prepared for a reelection bid (with Seibert as her campaign manager), their decision to nominate a German conservative loyalist to the role of EU envoy for small and medium businesses sparked a revolt.
Four commissioners, including Breton, questioned the decision to nominate Markus Pieper over two women who had reportedly scored higher in the selection process.
Two former officials recall that Seibert had defended the nomination internally, saying he had “no flexibility” in the matter.
That argument didn’t go down well.
The leadership duo would end up having to retract Pieper’s nomination. Critics argued that the episode underscored a lack of political sensitivity, as Seibert had failed to anticipate the blowback which came primarily from Breton along with then-top diplomat Josep Borrell; Luxembourgish Socialist ex-Commissioner Nicolas Schmit and Italian Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni.
“The problem is a lack of management experience,” the same former official said. “It leads to a tendency to do things in an authoritarian way.”
Everything goes through Bjoern
Von der Leyen and Seibert had learned their lesson.
When it was time to choose commissioners after von der Leyen was reelected in 2024, they forced out the rebellious Breton and stocked the College with less-experienced candidates. Here again, Seibert was on the front line, negotiating with political bosses in the European Parliament who needed to sign off on nominations during hearings.
One senior Parliament official described Seibert as someone who is “very professional” but also quick to use pressure when things aren’t going his way. “I’m noticing more and more that he doesn’t deal well with contradiction … He is not used to be contradicted in this sense.”
Once the hearings were over, Seibert got to work name-checking nominations of individual Cabinet members based on criteria of gender and nationality. Each commissioner had to send their list of Cabinet picks to the 13th floor, where the president’s chief of staff would personally approve or reject the names.
“This is a taste of the Seibert style,” said a current senior Commission official who pointed out that Seibert was the first head of Cabinet to have his name posted on a panel, right below the president’s name, in front of the elevator on the Berlaymont’s 13th floor. “He is not leaving anything to chance.”
Since then, Seibert’s grip on power in the Commission has only tightened further. A case in point: the recent restructuring of the Commission’s Secretary General office, planned and submitted for approval in January. A green light came three months later not due to any problem but because Seibert hadn’t been able to look at it yet.
A Cabinet member of a European prime minister quipped: “I know that he is a guy who does not know how to delegate, and that this inability to delegate and obsession to co-govern the commission with Ursula has caused bottlenecks and frustrations in the cabinets.”
My way or the highway
In other cases, critics chafed at Seibert’s tendency to steamroll opposition.
A senior Parliament official echoed the concern about Seibert’s power: “He’s in such a stage of full power that he speaks directly with the commissioners. He speaks directly with politicians. He is forgetting a little bit what his place is.”
Even as he wields his power in Brussels, Seibert now has to rebuild his relationship with Washington. Identified as “Biden’s man” due to his relationship with ex-national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Seibert played a key role in building the tightest transatlantic relationship in decades.
He and Sullivan would issue joint communiqués and worked in lockstep on rolling out sanctions against Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When Biden’s announcement of the Inflation Reduction Act threatened to fray ties between Brussels and Washington, it was Seibert’s behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the White House that led to a rare Rose Garden joint press conference by von der Leyen and Biden, according to a former high-ranking Commission official.
But this closeness hasn’t helped Seibert under Trump, who refused to speak to von der Leyen or any other EU official for months after his election. Seibert has recently accompanied top trade negotiator Maroš Šefčovič on negotiation trips to Washington D.C., but any hint of the old special relationship appears to be gone as Europe faces sky-high tariffs.
The Commission’s approach has been to tread carefully to avoid irking Trump, avoiding action — such as imposing a fine on Elon Musk’s X for violating the Digital Services Act — that might prompt a furious tweet or sudden retaliation.
But this approach, which now includes potential far-reaching concessions on Europe’s digital rulebook to clinch a trade deal, is undermining European sovereignty, according to critics who say the EU should defend its rules no matter the cost.
“This is all due to fear: fear of offending the Americans,” the former official said.
A Commission official who declined to be named underscored what they called regular contacts between Seibert and members of the Trump administration as well as in-person engagement, including Seibert’s trips to Washington.
Fear of the bear
All in all, Seibert’s reputation reflects the town he lives in: bureaucratic, power-mad, largely opaque. It generates myths around powerful civil servants who operate in the shadows, first Selmayr, now Seibert.
Few people interviewed for this piece voiced serious alarm about Seibert’s influence. But it’s telling that only one person out of 25 — a Dutch lawmaker no less — was willing to share a critical thought on record.
“In his interaction with the Parliament he has always been a fair player and keeping his promises,” said Greens lawmaker Eickhout. “The only issue is that this Commission is very hierarchical with nothing passing Bjoern without his consent. This leads to quite some files piling up at his desk and many Commission officials not knowing when what will be decided.
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify the European Commission’s position on von der Leyen’s texts with the CEO of Pfizer.