Jean-Claude Juncker
Jean-Claude Juncker was prime minister of Luxembourg for eighteen years, from 1995 to 2013, the longest-serving head of government in the European Union, and then president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, the years of the Greek crisis's last act, the refugee crisis, the Brexit vote and negotiation and the first Trump administration. He was the Christian Social steelworker's son who helped write the Maastricht treaty's chapter on monetary union at thirty-seven, chaired the Eurogroup of finance ministers through the euro crisis from 2005 to 2013, and said of that crisis that when it becomes serious you have to lie, and of European leaders that they all knew what to do but not how to get reelected after doing it. He was born in 1954 in Redange, the son of a steelworker conscripted into the Wehrmacht, studied law at Strasbourg, and was a junior minister at twenty-eight and finance minister at thirty-four under Jacques Santer, whom he succeeded when Santer went to the Commission in January 1995. Luxembourg under him was the richest country per head in the world and the financial centre whose banking secrecy and tax rulings for multinationals he defended as prime minister. He had to answer for them as Commission president when the LuxLeaks documents came out in his first weeks in Brussels. He fell in 2013 over the intelligence service's illegal wiretaps and the failure to control it, and the Socialists and Liberals under Xavier Bettel formed the first government without his party in thirty-four years. The European People's Party made him its Spitzenkandidat for the 2014 European election and the parliament insisted on him against Cameron and Orban, which set the precedent the leaders abandoned in 2019. The Commission's five years were the investment plan that bore his name and the third Greek bailout of July 2015 that he brokered through the night, the relocation scheme for refugees that the east refused. There was the Article 50 negotiation that he left to Barnier and the theatrical dinners with May and Johnson, and a press that photographed him unsteady on his feet and wrote about the drink he said was sciatica. He handed over to Ursula von der Leyen in December 2019 and lives in Luxembourg.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Luxembourgish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
