
Gert Jan Koopman (born 1966 in the Netherlands) is the Director-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations in the European Commission since 2023, after serving as Director-General for Budget from 2018 to 2022. He studied economics and classics at the University of Amsterdam, graduating cum laude. Koopman began his career in the Dutch Ministry of Finance before joining the European Commission, where he worked on competition policy, state aid, and economic governance. He played a central role in the creation and implementation of NextGenerationEU, the EU’s recovery instrument, and now leads the Commission’s enlargement and neighbourhood policy, focusing on Eastern Partnership countries and EU candidate states.