The nicknames Ursula von der Leyen has acquired over the course of her 29-year career in German politics tell their own story about the new president of the European commission.

During her time in charge of the family ministry, she was first called Krippen-Ursel (“crèche Ursel”), a conservative closet feminist set on expanding nursery places, and then Zensursula, a control freak who wanted to shield German youth from the dark sides of the internet.

When she became Germany’s first female defence minister in 2013, her (mostly male) detractors referred to her as Flinten-Uschi (“shotgun Uschi”), a caricature of the bossy career woman.

A liberal in conservative clothing or a pious authoritarian matriarch? If there is one quality the European commission’s first female president shares with her mentor Angela Merkel, it is that her political persuasions can be difficult to classify. Unlike Germany’s consensus-seeking chancellor, however, she is not afraid to raise hackles and divide opinion to drive through the policies she believes are right.

Born in October 1958, Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen spent her first 13 years in Brussels, where her father was one of the first pan-European civil servants. She attended the European School in Uccle, graduating two years before a certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson joined the same establishment.

One of seven children, she was raised in a Christian household that adhered to the traditional model of the West German nuclear family. As state premier of Lower Saxony, her father, Ernst Albrecht, became a leading figure of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a bete noire for the burgeoning Green movement, with whom he clashed over the opening of a nuclear waste depository.

Her mother, Heidi, took a supporting role, at times leading a family choir that serenaded its patriarch on German TV shows, and stating: “The best way for me to gain the respect of the public is through the role of motherliness.”

But if her father’s career enabled her international upbringing, it also allowed Von der Leyen to step out from his shadow.

When she was studying economics at the University of Göttingen in the late 1970s, her father was informed that his family could be a potential target for the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, and that his daughter should consider moving to another university.

Von der Leyen adopted the pseudonym Rose Ladson – a combination of her family nickname and the surname of her American great-grandmother – and enrolled at the London School of Economics.

“I lived much more than I studied,” she told the weekly Zeit. “No details, please. Only this: in 1978 I immersed myself for one year in this seething, international, colourful city. For me, coming from the rather monotonous, white Germany, that was fascinating.

“For me, London was the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything. This gave me an inner freedom that I have kept until today. And another thing I have kept: the realisation that different cultures can get on together very well.”

EU top jobs explained: who is coming in and what is their role? Read more

Switching to study medicine, she later worked as an assistant physician at a women’s clinic in Hanover and graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1991.

After she joined the CDU in 1990, on the same day her father stepped down from his job as state premier, her inner freedom made its mark on the posts she held, first as a regional and national delegate and then at the family, work and defence ministries.

“She has an incredible amount of energy”, said Daniel Goffart, a political correspondent for the news magazine Focus who co-wrote her biography in 2015. “You especially saw that in her bitter and protracted battle to modernise her party’s view on the role of the family.”

Under her watch, Germany introduced a law guaranteeing every child over 12 months of age a place at a daycare facility, and a paid parental leave scheme that includes at least two months of paid leave for fathers. She forced Merkel to drop her opposition to boardroom quotas for women, even though the policy was later defeated in the Bundestag.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ursula von der Leyen baking cookies with her seven children in 2003. Photograph: Jochen Luebke/AFP

Married since 1986 to a physician, Heiko, and mother to seven children, Von der Leyen has juggled a prolific career with family life – at the cost of popularity within her own party, some say. Instead of attending CDU summer fetes in rural Lower Saxony, said her biographer Goffart, she preferred to spend weekends at the family home in Beinhorn near Hanover when her children were still young.

Among her critics, the 60-year-old Von der Leyen has a reputation as an Einzelgängerin, a lone wolf with an instinct for front page-grabbing interviews and photo ops, but lacking the gift to pass the inner freedom driving her career down to the teams she works with.

If Von der Leyen’s approval ratings have recently plummeted, making her the least popular minister in Merkel’s cabinet, it is because her handling of Germany’s notoriously under-funded military at times displayed those same deficiencies.

When she diagnosed the troops with an “attitude problem” after the emergence of stories about rightwing extremist activities and hazing of new recruits, she was accused – and not only by members of the Bundeswehr – of choosing a good write-up over loyalty to her staff. “If she has a weakness, it is her tendency to excessive stage management,” said Goffart.

More recently, Von der Leyen grabbed negative headlines over the accusation that her defence ministry had allocated over-inflated contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to external consultants. A parliamentary committee is investigating the ministry for accusations of nepotism, and Von der Leyen is expected to be invited as a witness in December. In Brussels and Berlin, she will have two stages to manage.

• This article was amended on 17 July 2019. An earlier version said Ursula von der Leyen is not afraid to raise heckles, rather than hackles.