Ursula von der Leyen is facing a fresh ethics probe over her vanishing text messages with French president Emmanuel Macron about the EU’s controversial trade pact with Mercosur countries.
The probe follows a complaint by a journalist from the investigative outlet Follow The Money, whose 2024 request to access one of the messages was ignored for 15 months before being rejected. The Commission said it could not locate the message despite “exhaustive research,” explaining that it was sent on Signal with the ‘disappearing messages’ function enabled, meaning it is no longer stored on von der Leyen’s official phone.
This is not the first time the Commission president has found herself embroiled in a texting scandal. Earlier this year, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled against her in the so-called Pfizergate case, declaring the Commission wrong to withhold text exchanges with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. Those private messages, through which von der Leyen personally negotiated the procurement of nearly 1.8 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses, were initially denied to exist, then said to have been deleted, arguments the Court dismissed as “based either on assumptions or on changing or imprecise information.”
For critics, the Mercosur controversy demonstrates that the president’s secrecy over sensitive communications is not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern. That sentiment intensified in July, when 75 conservative MEPs triggered a no-confidence motion against von der Leyen—the first such move in more than a decade—citing her refusal to disclose the Pfizer texts despite the court ruling. In their reasoning, MEPs accused her of concentrating power in the Commission presidency and eroding transparency standards. Romanian MEP Gheorghe Piperea, author of the motion, warned that the “non-democratic concentration of decisions in the hands of the President of the European Commission goes against the principles of checks and balances.”
Although the motion failed, the debate highlighted the cracks within von der Leyen’s Ursula coalition’ and fueled accusations that her administration has become synonymous with corruption and institutional overreach.
The current Mercosur probe revives those concerns. Following the new complaint, the EU’s ethics watchdog has requested a meeting with Commission services before mid-October 2025 and asked for internal documents on how the request for access was handled.
The dispute comes at a crucial moment. The EU-Mercosur agreement, finalized in late 2024 after 25 years of negotiations, is the Commission’s largest and most contentious trade pact to date. It would create a free trade area of more than 700 million people, potentially destroying the livelihoods of many European farmers by allowing cheap, low-quality agricultural products from South America to flood the European market.
Environmental concerns are also rising as the deal could cause irreversible damage to the Brazilian indigenous lands.
Despite fierce opposition from farmers’ organizations—particularly in France—and from environmental groups, the Commission moved forward with ratification in September, presenting the text alongside promises of safeguards for EU farmers. Yet the new inquiry over missing messages threatens to overshadow those efforts, fueling doubts about transparency at the heart of Brussels’ most powerful institution.
