A French Commission veteran with scars from the eurozone crisis, Brexit and the EU’s pandemic recovery, Riso has quietly become one of the bloc’s most influential — and polarizing — civil servants. At 49 she’s heading up the mother of all assignments: steering the EU’s next budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), away from farmers’ subsidies and regional payouts toward more modern pan-European industrial projects.
Now that the budget draft, with Riso’s fingerprints all over it, has been published, it will shuttle between capitals and the European Parliament as a final version is nailed down. It’s a gargantuan task.
In a city where compromise is usually the order of the day, Riso’s unyielding style has already put some noses out of joint.
“The MFF has been written by three people locked in a room,” one EU official said, referring to Riso, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s head of cabinet Bjoern Seibert, and Céline Gauer, who oversees the post-Covid recovery fund. Like most of the others quoted in this article, the official was granted anonymity because they don’t want to breach confidences.
Internally in the Commission, Riso has ruffled feathers by sidelining departments, slashing budget lines, and pushing through controversial reforms with little regard for process or consensus. Officials said her tactics had sparked a mini-rebellion among commissioners, who banded together to block her most radical proposals in a dramatic 11th-hour showdown earlier this month inside the Berlaymont, the Commission’s headquarters.
What is normally a technocratic, dull process devolved into a late-night political knifing.