Von der Leyen deletes conversations with Macron from Signal

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is once again at the center of a major scandal after it emerged that she had set her messaging app Signal to automatically delete all conversations, according to an investigation recently published by the European investigative website Follow The Money, which was also picked up by the German press yesterday. The decision of the head of the Community Executive raises serious questions about transparency and the right of European citizens to access official information, given that specialists say that Signal is an application that offers a very high level of encryption of sent messages, which makes it very difficult for third parties to read them.

According to the cited source, in January 2024 Emmanuel Macron sent Ursula von der Leyen a message to lobby for a trade agreement with the Mercosur countries, but the Commission's response to an official request for access to these documents showed that the message had already been deleted. The European executive explained that the self-deletion function was activated to prevent possible data leaks and stated that all Commission employees are instructed to use this security option.

Critics were quick to react. Transparency International and other experts in democracy and access to information argue that this practice undermines public trust in the European institutions, transforming official communication into an opaque and impossible to verify process. Without these messages, no one can control whether decisions in Brussels are made transparently or whether there are hidden political pressures. Official statements according to which the messages contained only already known positions of France have not convinced public opinion and fueled suspicions of secrecy.

The controversy comes against the backdrop of another major scandal, known as Pfizergate. Ursula von der Leyen has been criticized for more than two years for refusing to make public the messages exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during the negotiation of billion-euro contracts for anti-COVID vaccines. The European Union's General Court recently ruled that the European Commission was wrong to block access to these messages and showed that the lack of a plausible explanation for their disappearance raises serious questions.

All these episodes paint the picture of a European leadership that prefers communication channels that are impossible to verify and gives the impression that it is hiding essential information of public interest. While the Commission invokes cybersecurity, civic organizations warn that, in reality, it is about the erosion of democratic principles and the loss of citizens' trust. The fundamental question remains a simple one: can the European Union maintain its credibility and legitimacy if its own leader chooses to communicate through messages that disappear without a trace?