The total eclipse of Margrethe Vestager

^{Photo illustration by Lynne Brouwer for POLITICO}

BRUSSELS — Margrethe Vestager is leaving the stage. Her smile fades, translators put down their headsets, the camera feed stops. The woman who was once the European Union’s most famous commissioner turns on her heels. She makes for the exit of the press room of the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters.

As the bloc’s high priestess of competition policy, Vestager has spent much of the past decade defending the EU’s sacrosanct internal market from government largesse and corporate concentration. But on this day in early February — with Europe reeling from the economic aftereffects of the coronavirus, Russia’s assault on Ukraine and growing protectionism in the United States — she has been forced to announce emergency measures relaxing many of the bloc’s tight rules on state subsidies, which some fear put that market at an existential risk.

Pressed by a reporter about whether the changes sit comfortably with her, Vestager shirked the question. “Satisfied or not … I’m the first one to declare my love for the single market and for competition,” she said, nonchalantly rebutting the inquiry.

There comes a time for any Brussels heavyweight when they bow out of the heights of European politics and either resign themselves to a career in the half-light of semi-anonymity or extend their reach to prestigious international roles. Of Vestager’s predecessors, Mario Monti eventually became Italian Prime Minister, Neelie Kroes mutated into a speed-dial lobbyist, Joaquín Almunia just stopped — and dabbled in academia and think-tankery.

Vestager doesn’t understand why people are wondering what she will do after the 2024 European election — when her second term finishes and the bloc’s top jobs are reassigned. Perhaps she will stay in Brussels, perhaps she will leave. But being Europe’s superstar competition commissioner, people want to know. And they have wanted to know for some time.

“I won’t judge your timing,” Vestager told me when I posed the question in an interview in early 2022. “But I don’t even ask myself these types of questions.”

Between the years 2014 and 2019, Vestager was everywhere. Her face was pasted across glossy magazines, and global dailies ran sycophantic profiles idly supplemented by hollow symbols propagated by Vestager’s spin doctors. The Lutheran parents, the middle-finger statue given to her by the Danish trade unions, the knitted elephants that she distributed to friends and colleagues.

Slingshotted into Brussels from national politics, where she had climbed to the rank of deputy prime minister, Vestager wasted little time imposing herself on the EU. She had eloped from Copenhagen in the aftermath of a national scandal, having pushed through debilitating welfare cuts that provoked the scorn of the trade unions. As competition commissioner, Vestager pledged to do things by the book: Neutrality, impartiality and rigor became her leitmotifs.

Her natural charisma, her political poise, the power of her office and her willingness to use it — together these made her more than your usual Brussels bureaucrat; by the sleepy standards of the EU’s capital, Vestager grew into the European Union’s first commissioner celebrity.

One of her close friends, Anita Bay Bundegaard, recalled how, in April 2018, when her star was at its zenith, Vestager celebrated her 50th birthday with friends, family and colleagues at her Copenhagen apartment. Bay Bundegaard remembered rooting through the kitchen cupboards, attempting to find an object of symbolic significance to present to the commissioner, something indicative of those first few battle-scarred years in Brussels.

Into Vestager’s arms a food mixer was thrust, denoting her affection for the art of cooking, but also a nod to what her admirers describe as her approach to policymaking: blending ingredients, balancing flavors, authoring compromise in the spirit of palatability, all of it offered with impeccable presentation.

“Monti used to read out from a piece of paper what the conclusions were on an individual enforcement case,” said Antoine Winckler, partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb. “You don’t have any of that with Mrs. Vestager.”

Her announcements, however bureaucratic, were press events; her decisions, delivered with panache; her targets, some of the biggest brand names in the world. Vestager was taming Goliath.

Four years later, when I interviewed Vestager in her 12^th-floor office in the Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters — flooded with ferociously colorful artwork and family photos — her star was falling, and she knew it.

She perched on the edge of a chair and clasped her thin hands. She listened as I reeled off a flurry of questions about her future in Brussels and her past regrets.

In the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament election, Vestager made a play to become president of the Commission — the New Lady of Europe, the face of European liberal democracy. Despite support from France’s President Macron, she faltered in the selection process — falling to Europe’s wider political machinations and the sheer unfeasibility of a liberal Commission president at a time when the Continent’s center could not hold.

When our conversation turned to those elections, Vestager drew breath and looked out of the window. Outside, the European quarter’s steel jungle rose out of the mist. “Being a liberal, there’s a limit to the height of your hopes,” she said. “I gave it a fair try. It would have been interesting to be president, but not being it isn’t the end of my life.”

Following her failed bid, Vestager was able to convince Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen — leader of the rival Social Democrat party — to send her back to Brussels, where she was promoted to executive vice president and given a widely expanded portfolio.

But often more senior roles in the upper floors of the Berlaymont can dilute a commissioner’s responsibilities. “Executive vice president? More like ex-valuable person,” one Commission official said.

Even before the coronavirus sucked the wind out of Brussels policymaking, it was already clear Vestager’s second term would not be a repeat of her first. As we spoke, a medley of faces stared at us from photo frames on a nearby sideboard. Ahead of the pandemic, Vestager’s husband and youngest daughter relocated to Denmark, seeking solace in Copenhagen’s cobbled streets and cream-licked buildings.

When Europe was hit by COVID-19, Vestager welded herself to her office — working late into the evening as Europe’s economy teetered precociously towards disaster. “She doesn’t need much sleep,” said Yizhou Ren — a former team member who now works with the Commission’s competition policy chief, Olivier Guersent.

At the end of a tortuous day at the Berlaymont during the depths of the pandemic, Vestager could often be seen walking through twilight Brussels, ducking under pub awnings and skipping over dog shit, back to her home in the city’s Flagey district. “All kinds of people live here,” Vestager said of the neighborhood she has occupied for nearly a decade.

In normal times Flagey’s 18^th-century townhouses accommodate families, while drunks stumble over one another in apartment block lobbies. On summer afternoons, students lounge on the banks of Ixelles Ponds and wrap their lips around twiggy joints while ragbag hipsters sip coffee at the Café Belga. The weekend market on Place Eugène offers plump, salty olives in huge glass bowls, freshly roasted chicken carcasses turn on steel rods, and almonds and hazelnuts are ground into sweet butters.

But the pandemic closed Flagey down. The streets became unpeopled. Empty trams trundled through the square. Desperately scrawled notes of apology appeared in dust-tinted restaurant door fronts. The area collapsed into itself, a vacuum. And the executive vice-president of the Commission found herself like many others: alone.

Vestager’s tragedy is that she didn’t slip or lose her political footing; it’s the landscape around her that changed. The coronavirus, Russia’s aggression, a reshuffling of the players in the Berlaymont and on the other side of the Atlantic — all these eroded her standing, leaving her elevated but isolated: the lone liberal, arms stretched out against the flood.

At home, she faced a protectionist push by the EU’s internal market chief Thierry Breton. A former top telecoms executive, former government minister, former science fiction novelist, the leonine Frenchman was injected into office during the 2019 reshuffle almost as an afterthought, and he’s been sucking up the oxygen ever since. In self-aggrandizing displays of sagacity, he’ll wag his finger at business bigwigs like Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai and tell them they’ve been naughty boys. He’ll go off-piste and pitch broad revisions to the EU’s green policy program or speak out against the German government’s plans to pour funds into its energy sector.

Into her second mandate, Vestager took a step backstage. Gone was the theater of grandiose competition cases, the glossy magazine covers and the Viking caricatures. The focus turned to preventative rather than curative interventions. New regulations targeting foreign subsidies and Big Tech — the Digital Markets Act — came in. Vestager, the pugnacious trustbuster, was relegated to a less prominent role.

It didn’t help that when her top lawyers appeared in front of EU judges, they faced a series of embarrassing losses. A landmark 2016 order by the Commission for Ireland to reclaim billions from Apple in unpaid taxes was overturned by the EU General Court in 2020. Last year, Vestager declined to appeal a decision to strike out a €997 million fine against Qualcomm, and earlier this year, the EU’s top court threw out her 2015 state aid case against car manufacturer Fiat’s tax deal with Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of a new breed of competition experts — personified by Lina Khan, the chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission — tipped the antitrust playing board in the direction of Washington.

In 2017, Khan made the competition world anew with her thesis — penned while she was a student at Yale Law School — that redrew decades of American antitrust orthodoxy. Borrowing from the economic theories of Louis Brandeis — an early-20th-century associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — Khan argued that in an era of massive, consolidated corporate power in the digital economy, the traditional way of evaluating abuses of dominance by looking at the impacts on consumers, was dead.

A later teacher of Khan’s was the heavy-knuckled one-time hack Barry Lynn — who during her formative years sat at the helm of Washington’s progressive Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank. And Lynn sees a divide between the ways of Washington’s Khan and Brussels’ Vestager. While he recognized that in the antitrust world, Vestager has been a “true hero” and is “enormously smart,” he also said that her profile began to wane when Khan entered office under the Biden administration. “She has a hard time seeing that the big tech corporations pose a direct and immediate threat to democracy and individual liberty,” Lynn said of Vestager. “She doesn’t fully understand their game or what’s at stake.”

As evidence of Vestager’s allegiance to an outdated standard, critics have pointed to her acquiescence in 2020 to Google’s $2.1 billion buyout of fitness tracker Fitbit. Tommaso Valletti, a former chief economist at the Commission and critic of the merger, said that the deal provoked the concern of many people outside conventional competition circles and that it became indicative of the wider threats of Big Tech buyouts on the data economy. “We tried to help pro bono the Commission, pushing the boundaries, but we failed,” Valletti said. “It is my sense that our interventions were not welcomed by economists in the Commission’s competition department.” But Vestager had little room to maneuver: Her competition toolbox was under-equipped to deal with the complaints of privacy advocates. She passed the deal.

If there was any doubt that Vestager was feeling under increasing attack, they were dispelled when she took to the stage at an annual antitrust policy conference at Brussels’s extravagant Steigenberger hotel. Dressed in a flowing green gown plumed with clouds of black, Vestager appeared to have adorned military-style colors. “We keep hearing that antitrust does not deliver or that antitrust looks at the wrong issues,” she told the audience, which included Khan and Valletti. “Some of you here are frequent critics.”

In her address, Vestager defended her approach to antitrust. The Commission had done what it had always done under her leadership, Vestager said. Enforcing the law as it had been written. Doing things by the book.

She also wanted to rebut any accusations of obstinacy. Citing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, she noted that “the only constant in life is change.” Given the impermanent machinations of the market economy, she said, the Commission would have to continuously adapt its enforcement instruments. “For the rest of our careers,” she concluded, change would be the sole certainty.

Today, Vestager is stuck in the pull of two opposing forces, fixed between her battle to secure her legacy and questions about what’s next. In the months that follow, she may seek to close chapters on many of the outstanding cases remaining in the Commission’s most important policy portfolio. She will also be browsing for a new job.

In Brussels talk is already turning to the dealmaking that will follow the 2024 European election, when the top positions in town will be up for grabs. At the head of the pack, should NATO not be her next destination, many expect Ursula von der Leyen to seek and clinch a second term as Commission president. Some have speculated that Breton, who has made no secret of his willingness to replace von der Leyen, would be happy to settle for what is arguably the EU’s second-most-powerful portfolio: Vestager’s. An influential French competition commissioner to balance out the German president.

Whether or not Breton makes a play for the job, Vestager’s competition playbook is already under attack. On the issue of government subsidies, von der Leyen and Breton are aligned. A self-indulgent spirit is already prowling across the European economy with two centers of global power in its sights — China and the U.S. To counter the duo, and to offset the suffering caused by the pandemic and war, the ascendent thinking goes, Europe must revamp its industrial policy and throw more cash at producers. In the world of antitrust policy, the sun is setting on the Vestagerian age.

What’s next for the competition chief herself is less clear. Her protestations aside, few around her believe she isn’t already plotting her next move. The Danish press has already started speculating about a return to domestic politics after the 2024 European elections. But after two mandates in Brussels in charge of the EU’s most powerful portfolio, it’s unlikely the familiarity of the mother country will suffice.

In Brussels and under whispered breaths, EU bureaucrats are pitching their own quests for power on Vestager’s future — scuttlebutts of European Investment Bank and International Monetary Fund are crawling around the city, as her next possible destinations.

In October last year, I attended a gathering at The Egg venue in Brussels, a converted industrial warehouse where conversations echo throughout the building’s cold, hollow, gray anterooms. Entitled “Making Markets Work for People,” the event was very much Vestager’s, a return to the days when she dominated the stage.

In a short speech, Vestager told the audience that she wasn’t a mere technician enacting the rule of law. Antitrust policy has a social dimension, she said. At a time of increasing inflation and spiraling economic turmoil, enforcement of the EU’s competition rulebook is “for the people.”

The moment, as the Commission made clear in its promotion of the event, was all about her. She was hosting, coordinating and running the show, and when she departed the stage, she stepped down into the refreshment area, lassoing smiles around the room and drawing in bystanders with her rapturous gaze.

“This is the beginning,” one attendee whispered into my ear, breath laden with the aftertaste of coffee. “It’s starting. Her campaign. Here. Now.”

Not long after, Vestager, surrounded by a coterie of hangers-on, exited the venue through the doors that open onto Brussels’ wastelands, with its tumors of smog and screaming cars. With a final glance behind her, Europe’s one-time star, in all her grace, disappeared into the EU capital’s syrupy gloom.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Louis Brandeis’s title. He was an early-20th-century associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.