Commission-companion-full

VICE-PRESIDENT
A
Digital single market
ndrus Ansip
Country Estonia
Born Tartu, 1 October 1956
Political affiliation ALDE
Twitter
@Ansip_EU
The 2014 resignation of Andrus Ansip
marked the end of an era. Not only
had he been the longest­serving prime
minister in Estonia’s history, he had also
been the safe pair of hands who had
shepherded the country through the
crippling 2008­09 recession. Ansip had
staked his career on beating the recession
and the country had come out on top –
even as the popularity of his right of centre
Estonia Reform Party was in decline.
Yet Ansip’s time at Estonia’s helm during
the crisis did not get off to a flying start.
While a burgeoning budget deficit required
wholesale slashing, the person the
conservative Ansip relied on most – his
finance minister, Ivari Padar – had become
distracted. Padar was top of the Social
Democrats’ list for the European Parliament
election and, detractors claimed, had lost
focus. The tension between the two men
erupted at a press conference, when they
began bickering in front of astonished
journalists.
For the usually unflappable Ansip, it was
the last straw. He fired Padar and two other
ministers (thereby losing his majority in the
parliament), took much of Padar’s work on
himself and drafted drastic spending cuts.
It was a gamble, but one that eventually
paid off: Estonia’s quarterly gross domestic
product grew by 2.6% in the last three
months of 2009 (the best result in the EU,
said Eurostat, the European Commission’s
statistical office). At a time when the euro
was languishing, Estonian fiscal policy in
2009 – with low government debt and the
EU’s third smallest deficit – became
something of a guidepost for less disciplined
European countries.
Ansip had been leading the country since
2005, and whatever his achievements in
fending off the recession, by 2014 his
government was on the wane. Ansip
realised he had reached the end of the line
and that only a fresh face could reverse the
party’s fortunes at the 2015 elections.
Born, raised and educated in Tartu, a
quintessential university town, Ansip
abandoned his career in organic chemistry
in the first years of Estonian independence,
entering the world of business and banking.
With his prodigious memory for numbers
and a scientist’s skill at hair­splitting
18
analysis, he would have felt at home in the
financial sector. In English (his other foreign
languages are Russian and German), Ansip is
known to rattle off statistics like a walking
almanac.
In 1998, Ansip was elected mayor of Tartu,
Estonia’s second­largest city. It was a post
that helped him ascend the ranks of the
centre­right Reform Party and, in 2004, he
moved to Tallinn after being appointed
economy minister (he spends his weekends
in Tartu with his wife Anu, a gynaecologist,
and the youngest of their three daughters).
Personality has played a role in Ansip’s
staying power. “Andrus is, in a certain way,
a take­it­or­leave­it type of person,” said
Igor Grazin, a party colleague. “He usually
doesn’t have a secondary motive. Even
people who don’t like him generally support
him, or at least respect him.”
Ansip headed his party’s list for the
European elections last year and was later
nominated as Estonia’s commissioner by his
successor as prime minister, the 35­year­old
Taavi Rõivas. Given that Andris comes from
one of the most digitally connected
countries in the world, where citizens can
vote online and wi­fi is omnipresent, it is
not difficult to understand why Jean­Claude
Juncker appointed him to be vice­president
for the digital single market.
CV
2014 Elected as a member of the
European Parliament
2014 Member of the Estonian parliament
2005-14 Prime minister
2004-05 Minister of economic affairs
and communications
1998-2004 Mayor of Tartu
1994-95 Deputy head of Tartu
department, North Estonian Bank
1993-94 Board member, Rahvapank
1992 Degree in business management,
York University, Toronto
1983-86 Senior engineer, Institute of
General and Molecular Pathology, Tartu
State University
1979 Degree in organic chemistry, Tartu
State University
The key question now is how Ansip shares
this post with Günther Oettinger, the
commissioner for the digital agenda. Ansip
has not been one to share the spotlight in
the past and already there has been the
appearance of tension between the two
men. Oettinger reportedly characterised
Ansip as his ‘assistant’ during a closeddoors
meeting in Berlin last year, implying
that the role of vice­president – which on
paper gives Ansip oversight of digital policy
– was merely ceremonial.
Oettinger may be in for a shock: having
guided Estonia through a difficult economic
period, Ansip is unlikely to settle for being a
wallflower in the coming term.
Cabinet
Head of cabinet
Juhan Lepassaar
Deputy head of cabinet
Kamila Kloc
Cabinet members
Laure Chapuis
Jörgen Gren
Aare Järvan
Hanna Hinrikus
Jasmin Battista
Jeremy Smith
Maximilian Strotmann
Ansip’s private office is headed by Juhan
Lepassaar, a young Estonian who
worked in the office of Siim Kallas, who
served two terms as commissioner.
There are former members of Kallas’s
private office working for Ansip,
including Laure Chapuis, Max
Strotmann and Hanna Hinrikus. One of
the main players in the team is Jörgen
Gren, a Swedish official who worked in
the department for communications
networks, content and technology and
was the spokesman for the Swedish
government when it held the presidency
of the Council of Ministers in 2009.