If Margrethe Vestager—the EU’s infamous anti-trust boss—got one, surely Europe’s grand doyenne of internet privacy deserves a nickname, too?
“I really dreamt about having a nickname from President Trump. He gave a nickname to my colleague, Margrethe Vestager, who is the champion of fighting for fair competition in the EU, and I think he called her ‘that horrible tax lady,” said Věra Jourová, the European Commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, speaking at Coins2Day’s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London on Monday night.
“I dreamt about being called that ‘horrible privacy lady,’ and I really thought about what I had to do to get that to happen,” Jourová said.
There’s still time—and in fact, Trump was in London on Monday for his U.K. State visit. The “horrible privacy lady” is a reference to Jourová’s work as the architect of the GDPR, the EU’s landmark data privacy legislation.
The Czech politician says she’s used the example of Trump’s rise in the United States to push more women to go into politics. The recent European elections, in which far-right parties did not do as well as expected, she says was proof that populism could be halted.
The commissioner also described her relationship with Big Tech—”it is a kind of love and hate affair”—and admitted that she deleted her own Facebook profile two years ago. “I was fed up with it,” she said.
And after appearing on U.K. News earlier in the day to reiterate the EU’s position on Brexit—it is unlikely the EU will change its position regardless of who leads the British government—she admitted Brexit itself was also exhausting.
“We really need to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
