BRUSSELS — As the European Union’s importance on the world stage grows, its politics are fragmenting: Smaller, more ideological parties, including populists and nationalists, have made gains and weakened the traditional, more centrist parties.

How have the bloc’s leaders responded? By calling on strong consensus builders to head up its key institutions. Here are the major names you need to know.

The first woman to lead the E.U.’s huge bureaucracy

Germany’s center-right defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, will be returning to the city of her birth, Brussels, once she’s confirmed to lead the European Union’s most important institution and her father’s former workplace: the European Commission.

A medical doctor and economist by training, she is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. She is likely to bring a fervor for more European integration to the job — music to the ears of much of her 32,000-strong staff of bureaucrats, but less so to skeptical leaders in countries like Hungary and Poland, who would like to keep their nations’ priorities front and center.