How Teresa Ribera became the second-most powerful person in Brussels

Elsewhere, Luxembourg’s EPP politician Christophe Hansen is in line for the agriculture portfolio, providing another potential counterweight to Ribera, who wants the agriculture industry to go faster on emissions cuts than her right-leaning counterparts.

“Obviously people will look a lot at the [executive vice presidents], but in reality, I think the key holders are the holders of the individual files,” said the senior Commission official.

Still, Ribera’s unwieldy official title of “executive vice president” for a “clean, just and competitive transition” barely obscures the breadth of her duties. It notably includes the job of competition chief, which turned Danish politician Margrethe Vestager — or Europe’s “tax lady,” as former U.S. President Donald Trump called her — into a household name. 

On top of that, von der Leyen wants Ribera to lead work on designing a “Clean Industrial Deal” bill to boost climate-friendly technologies, enshrining a 2040 emissions-cutting target of 90 percent into law, bringing down energy prices, redrawing taxation to match EU climate goals and ensuring social fairness in the green transition alongside drawing up a new state aid framework and enforcing competition rules. 

Much of the granular, climate-related work will be delegated to the commissioners working under her, which include Hoekstra, Roswall and Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen, a Socialist chosen to run energy and housing policy. 

Yet Ribera, von der Leyen said on Tuesday, is the person who “will guide the work to ensure that Europe stays on track for its goals set out in the European Green Deal and that we decarbonize and industrialize our economy at the same time.” 

Max Griera and Barbara Moens contributed reporting from Strasbourg.