Exit Urpilainen: An EU development chief’s final act

Jutta Urpilainen is finding her voice on her way out the door. As the political appointee responsible for the European Commission’s foreign aid budget — the third-largest counted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development DAC behind the United States and Germany — the 49-year-old Finn has done a string of media interviews of late. Legacy building in the closing days of her five-year term? It’s a Brussels tradition. She told Deutsche Welle last month that China is creating “dependencies” through irresponsible lending in Africa — even if research from the ONE Campaign shows the picture of the continent’s creditors is more complicated. And the former finance minister continued in that candid vein when she recently spoke to Devex in Washington, D.C., on the sidelines of the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. On critical raw minerals: “We are very dependent on China … so we have to multiply, we have to diversify our partnerships with our partners”, she said. That means deals with the likes of Rwanda, despite controversy over whether the minerals in question are plundered from the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. On migration: “We can never ever build that kind of wall which would stop 2.5 billion citizens from coming to Europe,” she said, citing the number of people projected in Africa by 2050. “So the only way to prevent illegal migration and also I would say manage migration in a sustainable way is really to invest in those societies and provide more opportunities.” Urpilainen oversaw a blowout in the share of EU foreign aid going to migration to 14% in 2021 and 2022, well above the legislated target of 10%. And, on official development assistance, or ODA: Urpilainen said the commission was now in a “post-ODA era, so that we use ODA funding but we use that in a new way, in a more efficient way, so that we try to use public resources in order to leverage private investment.” Some 93% of the seven-year €79.5 billion ($84.1 billion) budget Urpilainen helps oversee must be counted as ODA. And the commission has been trying to leverage private investment with EU taxpayers’ money for years. The EU’s confusion does not end there. Urpilainen said she wants more buy-in from European Union countries to the idea of “Team Europe” — what the commission calls the collective financing of itself plus the 27 EU member states, the European Investment Bank, and the not-wholly-EU-owned European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. And she told Deutsche Welle that the EU must have its own “offer” against China and others in the world’s current “battle of narratives”. But she also told Devex that she wants to see more of what she dubbed “Team Global,” putting an end to the “international community” working “in silos,” and greater collaboration between Europe, the United Nations, and the World Bank. It is not clear how the BRICS nations, representing roughly 40% of the world’s population, fit into this vision of Team Global. Urpilainen told Devex it is “very, very sad” to see EU states decreasing their national ODA budgets and she has called for more attention to be paid to such cuts. But she posted on X earlier this year that EU national leaders’ new budget for the commission — which included a €2 billion cut to development — showed the bloc was delivering on its priorities, i.e., supporting Ukraine and preventing irregular migration. She told Devex that “in terms of funding, least-developed countries are our priority”. But according to OECD, between 1990 and 2022, the share of commission aid going to LDCs dropped from 52% to 19%. And the way Urpilainen’s department implemented the recent €2 billion cut — boosting regional investment envelopes for geopolitically useful states while slashing individual national allocations, including to the lowest-income countries — will mean an average annual reduction in spending across LDCs of 35% for 2025-2027 when compared to the amounts allocated for 2021-2024, according to Devex’s calculations. Urpilainen said she could not talk about those figures because she was not familiar with them. But they have been at the heart of an interinstitutional battle for months. Finally, she has posted about the “importance of delivering measurable results.” But the commission’s recent claim — repeated by Urpilainen — to have mobilized €179 billion in investments around the world in the past two years, was provided with no accompanying information or breakdown on how that figure was arrived at. Gateway upgrade Like it or not, Urpilainen’s legacy will likely be tied to the Global Gateway. That’s the commission’s name for its Belt and Road-rivaling investment strategy, which in its initial stages has tried to recast the narrative of the bloc’s collective 2021-2027 development budget. To listen to the public messaging, the Global Gateway is all about transformative infrastructure investments in green and digital technologies. Development staples such as health and education are part of it, we are told — the “software” to accompany the infrastructure “hardware” — but their inclusion has always appeared more precarious. As Urpilainen told Devex in a February 2022 interview, it is difficult to find a compelling case for how to use EU taxpayers’ money to de-risk development banks to invest in profit-making education projects in the lowest-income countries. One of her hopes, she told Devex in Washington, is that health and education remain part of the Global Gateway during the next commission. She has made education, in particular, a priority, and her successor, Czech Trade and Industry Minister Jozef Síkela, committed last week to maintaining at least 13% of commission development funding for education through 2027. Plus, Urpilainen has created and championed the idea of applying an inequality marker to evaluate the commission’s development spending, which has similarly been accepted by Síkela. But her focus on youth engagement, education, and inequality has at times appeared out of step with the way the gateway has been sold by her boss, commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as “a new approach to big infrastructure projects.” An anonymous senior official from Urpilainen’s own department told Politico recently that her successor could represent “an upgrade,” with “precisely the right résumé, profile and personality that we require.” The unflattering comparison was hard to miss. And it speaks to the sense that for all her talk of the need for more collaboration between Brussels and EU member states, Urpilainen has struggled to find her place between von der Leyen’s notorious last-minute, top-down fiats, and Urpilainen’s own department charged with implementing them. The secret chord They say in Brussels no one can hear you scream. Everyone speaks English and massacres French, while the backroom deals get hashed out in German. It’s a confusing place with Byzantine power structures that take years to decipher. Most commissioners don’t get that long. A long-expected and unsuccessful — 4.3% — tilt at becoming the president of Finland for her center-left political party in early 2024 did nothing to dilute the sense that Urpilainen was always just passing through Brussels. Amid all the prerecorded statements, boilerplate speeches, and long, didactic answers at the European Parliament’s development committee, two moments stand out for this reporter from the Urpilainen era. First, a speech in March 2023 in the basement of a nondescript Brussels hotel, addressing the EU NGO confederation CONCORD. Suddenly comfortable and passionate on the topic of inequality, it was hard not to wonder whether Urpilainen would have been a better fit these past five years on the outside looking in — advocating, prodding, sometimes powerless, but at least safe in the courage of her convictions. As a former national politician, she told the smallish civil society crowd in attendance that day that for her the connection with citizens has always been key. “I need to be able to listen to my voters but also to be able to explain to them why we have taken certain decisions,” she said, “in order to earn the legitimacy for the activities and decisions we have taken.” That’s probably a too-high bar for any EU commissioner in Brussels — all of whom are nominated by their national governments — let alone one charged with overseeing funding for hundreds of programs in dozens of countries worldwide. The second moment was in November 2023: In a sports hall built by Chinese aid money, on a hill overlooking Appia, in Samoa, as Urpilainen sat for hours overseeing the signing of something once called the Post-Cotonou Agreement. It had been a long road since she was tasked at the beginning of her mandate with negotiating and concluding the agreement between the EU and 79 African, Caribbean, and Pacific states. The whole thing almost died of neglect in the intervening years, with even French President Emmanuel Macron appearing to question the point of continuing with a post-colonial format with no funding implications. Still, von der Leyen’s 2019 “mission letter” to Urpilainen called for a deal. Birds chirped down from the rafters and the Pacific heat hung heavy as bewildered early-career attachés from various EU representations in Australia and New Zealand took turns walking up to the regal signing book. Then, through a sea of white fans, the choir in the bleachers struck up the familiar major-minor introduction to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, performed in the local language. I watched Urpilainen — a capable singer, who once studied music on Erasmus in Vienna — as her face changed, transported: Conveying if not happiness, then something like peace. Not for the first time I wondered what she was thinking. Maybe this: After countless meetings and trips, policy papers and committee hearings, delays and deceptions and dreary winters and Belgian bureaucracy … It was all — almost — over. Hallelujah.