They can't cut funding for "not voting the way they want". Funding can be held back if governments violate treaty obligations, after a lengthy process. (I.e. the other referenced examples have clear reasons why the process is running, and it's not because who the voters voted for ...)

And maybe von der Leyen will lobby for a stricter reading of those treaties if the wrong party gets elected, which is the subtext of her words, obvious to all but the most willfully obtuse.

So some lawyers will spend some extra years fighting over some edge cases, with very unclear results if its not something serious but a fishing operation as you suggest. Or some actual legal issues will have to be resolved. Scary.

Love that you finally admit they were threats, and now are just trying to minimize them. Go ask the Germans how empty Biden’s threats to end the gas pipelines they depended on were.

No, I merely argue that if you read them to be threats in that sense, they are pretty pointless threats. And it thus makes little sense to read them as such, because they would be such unimpressive threats.

Your US/Germany comparison doesn't work, since that's an entirely different situation. For starters, a state like the US can actually apply pressure or use force, because there isn't an established strong framework saying it can't nor anything directly enforcing what little there is. US enforced sanctions over the pipeline construction because it didn't like the pipeline, nothing Germany can do directly. (And if you want to assume the recent sabotage was the US, pretty much the same applies)

The commission is just not an independent state-level actor in that way. It's actually constrained by a state-like legal framework around it, granting it limited powers for specific purposes. Outside of those, it can and will be reigned in very quickly.