‘Invisible’ Kamala Harris struggles to win over Europe

BRUSSELS — Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the U.S. presidential election gave European politicians an urgent new question: What would Kamala Harris be like? 

Vice President Harris is now the hot favorite to become the Democratic nominee to take on Donald Trump in November’s election. Speaking candidly, centrist European politicians and officials suggested Harris has yet to convince them she can beat him.

Isabel Schnabel, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, was caught on a hot mic earlier this year criticizing the vice president as “invisible”, and predicting that she would never win. The Democratic Party selection process “is a failure,” Schnabel said in comments reported here for the first time. 

“They should have built up another candidate to Kamala Harris from the beginning,” Schnabel said in a private conversation ahead of a panel event in February, apparently unaware her remarks were being live-streamed. “She would never win an election, I mean that’s hopeless.” Schnabel’s next comment was particularly cutting: “I don’t even know her because she has been so invisible.”

The ECB on Monday called the quotes “misleading”, saying Schnabel “never comments in public on political events.”

Speaking privately — though not on a hot mic — other people familiar with Harris’s style of diplomacy criticized her speeches, recalling that she tended to read from a prepared text in a stilted manner.

Two officials who met with Harris at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year told POLITICO she displayed a split-screen persona at the gathering.

On the one hand, her public interventions were highly-scripted — speeches delivered via teleprompter, with little spontaneity, with her 2023 speech at the same conference particularly ill-received as applause-lines bombed and she failed to connect with the audience. 

Another example of this is her feather-ruffling appearance at a U.K. artificial intelligence conference in 2023. Harris came on stage late, to presidential music, and gave a speech — described to POLITICO as “banal” by one attendee — which poked holes in the flagship conference’s theme.

The British government, then led by Rishi Sunak, spun the VP’s involvement as a positive, but in private was unimpressed at being upstaged at its own event, and made its feelings known to White House officials.

But her off-diary meetings show a more engaged, charismatic side, said two officials, whether she was meeting with European politicians or weighing-in on meetings on the Three Seas Initiative, a U.S. policy which seeks to build links between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black seas. 

One official pointed out that Brussels has been overly complacent about the strength of the EU’s relationship with the U.S. during the Biden years. After the upheaval of Trump, transatlantic ties solidified during in the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when Washington and Brussels worked hand-in-glove on efforts to repel Vladimir Putin. 

The British government, then led by Rishi Sunak, spun Kamala Harris’s involvement as a positive, but in private was unimpressed at being upstaged at its own event, and made its feelings known to White House officials. | Pool photo by Alastair Grant via AFP/Getty Images

But with Biden’s team so engaged, EU officials didn’t do as much to engage with Harris. 

“There is an argument that the EU should have made more of an effort to cultivate relations with Harris, given Biden’s age,” said one senior EU official, like others speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But on the other hand, she didn’t exactly make that easy. It wasn’t easy to find occasions to meet Harris.”

In Britain, too, officials are trying to figure her out, hoping that the choice of her running mate will help shed light on what she would do if elected. “A lot of work will be going on to map out what a Kamala presidency will look like and what she thinks and feels about issues, and how we deal with her and the people around her,” said one U.K. official. “I mean, I think we really need to see her VP, and then we can assess the whole ticket and kind of get our claws into every bit of the ticket.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who has just been re-elected for a five-year term, has held only one bilateral meeting with Harris, on the fringes of the Munich Security Conference in 2022, though the two have met at other international events. 

In public, European politicians remain keen to stay positive. 

“I wish all the best to Kamala Harris, she’s a woman, a strong woman, I wish her all the best,” Belgium’s Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib told reporters ahead of a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels Monday — the closest any European politician at the meeting got to an endorsement.

“I have seen Vice President Harris at each of her appearances at the Munich Security Conference and found her to be a very charismatic, intelligent and humorous woman who was clearly committed to her transatlantic beliefs,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent Christian Democrat lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee in Berlin.

They don’t say it aloud, but the critical question for many in the EU mainstream is not what Harris would be like in the White House, but whether she has what it takes to beat Trump to get there. 

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis paid tribute to President Biden in an interview with POLITICO Monday. He declined to comment on Harris’ probable nomination because the process is still ongoing. “Assuming she is the nominee, I think that it would be inappropriate for us Europeans to interfere in the US election,” he said, adding: “but it is certainly appropriate that we need to prepare for all eventualities.” 

Jacopo Barigazzi, Barbara Moens, Clea Caulcutt, Laura Kayali, Nette Nöstlinger, Vincent Manancourt and Eugene Daniels contributed reporting.