What has become of Charlemagne? It’s a question one might ask in view of this year’s recipient of the Karlspreis. It’s unlikely that Charlemagne would have cared about someone of Ursula von der Leyen’s ilk (to be referred to as UvdL in the remainder of this piece). But if he had, he would surely be turning in his grave.

Having been established by the City of Aachen in 1950 (just one year after the German Constitution came into being), the Charlemagne Prize is awarded annually for work done in the service of European unification. It commemorates Charlemagne (748 - 814), ruler of the Frankish Empire and founder of what would become the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne is celebrated as the great unifier of Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The City of Aachen, in whose cathedral Charlemagne is buried, refers to him as “the founder of Western culture”. From a slightly more detached angle, The Economist has long run a column called by the great Emperor’s name. Now written by Stanley Pignal (the magazine’s Brussels bureau chief), it used to be a jolly good read. But that’s another story.

Past recipients of the prize include Jacques Delors (1992), Bill Clinton (2000), Jean-Claude Juncker (2006), Angela Merkel (2009), Donald Tusk (2011), Jean-Claude Trichet (2012), Wolfgang Schäuble (2013), Hermann van Rompuy (2015), Martin Schulz (2016), Pope Francis (2017), Emmanuel Macron (2019), Volodymyr Zelenski (2024). And now the choice has fallen on UvdL, the current president of the European Commission. Germany and France lead the league table of Charlemagne Prize awardees: Germany snatched it ten times, just ahead of France who got it nine times.

What is striking is how little attention the ceremony attracts outside Germany and the exclusive group of hard-core Europhiles across the Continent. The latter won’t of course miss an occasion to engage in the ceremonial glorification of the European project. People who regard the nation-state as a dangerous fantasy can alway be relied upon when it comes to embellishing collective fantasies more attuned to their own prejudices. Perhaps that’s the reason why so few outside the EU bubble tend to get involved in these events. Most people, it seems, have more pressing needs to attend to than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Things like unemployment or falling living standards; or mainstream parties that, except in their rhetoric, are pursuing policies that are largely indistinguishable from one another in a Europe ruled by legal supranationalism.

Report on the Karlspreis Ceremony on German TV: ARD (above) and FAZ (below)

The other thing that is striking is, of course, this year’s recipient. A professional politician from a very young age who managed to get into Angela Merkel’s good books, UvdL hails from a family that married considerable wealth with political influence (her father, an industrialist, was minister-president of Lower Saxony during the 1970s). She then studied economics at Göttingen and Medicine at Hannover, where she obtained a doctorate, which, for members of Germany’s political class, is a bit de rigueur. Speaking of her doctorate: her dissertation was heavily plagiarised, which didn’t harm her political career though. Indeed, von der Leyen epitomises the kind of modern-day politician for whom every failure results in a promotion. As my wife likes to call it: failing upwards. So deficient was her performance as Germany’s Minster of Defence (2013 - 2019), that she was swiftly wheeled off to the European Commission, whose President she duly became. And now, with the Charlemagne Price under her belt, she looks even more unimpeachable than when she committed her greatest blunders.