The President of the European Council, António Costa, has given this Friday to the governments of the European Union until next Wednesday, 18 November, to submit their proposed candidates for the next vacancies on the board of the European Central Bank (ECB). The Twenty-Seven aspire to agree on these appointments at the same time as the changeover of Christine Lagarde at the head of the institution, a post for which the Spanish Pablo Hernández de Cos and the Dutch Klaas Knot are competing, according to statements by EU sources.
The former Portuguese prime minister has communicated this timetable to the heads of State and Government of the EU gathered this Friday at a summit in Dublin, where it was planned to address informally the distribution of the ECB’s top posts. Neither the head of Government, Pedro Sánchez, nor the Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, attended the meeting, whose Executives support, respectively, the candidacies of De Cos and Knot.
Costa’s intention is that, by the end of the formal summit scheduled for 26 November in Brussels, the leaders achieve an agreement on the distribution of the three posts at stake — the presidency, the chief economist, and the director of market operations — and can then activate consultations with the European Parliament and with the ECB’s Executive Board. This step is essential in order to complete the procedure before Lagarde leaves office on 7 February.
With this new timetable, the deadline for Member States to submit names to fill the vacancies at the helm of the ECB will close in the afternoon of 18 November. This will allow the Council to have a solid basis for making its recommendation to the leaders “in time” ahead of the 26 November summit, the same sources have clarified.
On 8 November, the euro area Finance ministers (Eurogroup) analysed for the first time the candidacies of De Cos and Knot, the only candidates registered within the deadline for the ECB presidency, although no decision was adopted, given that final responsibility lies with the heads of State and Government.
France and Germany shape the distribution of posts
This very Friday, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has advanced before the media in Dublin that he expects to present in the coming days his proposal for the allocation of the top jobs at the ECB, although he has refused to specify the names he has because he still needs to finalize the ongoing talks with his coalition partners.
The German leader stressed that there is “being debated very intensely” regarding the appointments of several members of the ECB’s board, but he has warned that there are “outstanding agreements” that have not yet been completed.
His remarks come after, in the last few hours, various French and German media outlets have published that Paris and Berlin are finalizing an understanding that would give the presidency of the ECB to the Spaniard De Cos, over the Dutchman Klaas Knot.
If that pact were to move forward, the allocation of the future vacancies in the board would include the designation of a French representative for the market operations portfolio, in replacement of Isabel Schnabel, while Germany would keep the chief economist position, which Philip Lane will leave in May.
Among the German candidates being considered for the chief economist role are Markus Brunnermeier and Tobias Adrian, former director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the IMF. At the same time, Laurence Boone, former chief economist of the OECD and current director of corporate and investment banking at Santander for France and Ireland, appears on the short list as one of the main options to take responsibility for market operations.