Who will succeed Christine Lagarde as President of the European Central Bank?

The 21 member countries of the euro zone had until Friday to propose a candidate to succeed Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank. The applications must be examined from Monday November 9 by the Union Finance Ministers. Christine Lagarde announced her early departure for next February, eight months before the official end of her mandate, to – she explains – “regain her freedom of speech in the context of the campaign for the presidential election in France”.

We already know that the succession at the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) will be played out between the Dutchman Klaas Knot and the Spaniard Pablo Hernández de Cos, two candidates officially in the running. Also read "I wish to have the freedom to commit": why Christine Lagarde is leaving the ECB six months before the presidential election France has not proposed a candidate because it would be difficult for Paris to win a new mandate after the previous two. Since 2003, two French people have chaired the European Central Bank: Christine Lagarde and previously Jean-Claude Trichet.

Between these two French presidencies, there was Italy with Mario Draghi, called at the time "super Mario" for having calmed the financial markets and saved the euro during the great sovereign debt crisis of 2012. Trichet, Draghi, Lagarde, three personalities from Southern Europe. Many are now campaigning for a rebalancing and an alternation with a president from Northern Europe.

The Dutchman Klaas Knot would thus hold the rope. Would Christine Lagarde have presidential ambitions? However, France is not completely out of the game.

She is aiming for another key position, that of chief economist of the ECB, currently occupied by the Irishman Philip Lane. In Paris, several names are circulating to take over: Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, economist, current deputy governor of the Banque de France and Laurence Boone, also an economist, former minister of European Affairs, today general director in France of the Spanish bank Santander. Meanwhile, Christine Lagarde is said to have ambitions for the presidential election in France.

Predictions are going well in the series "the providential man will perhaps be a woman", while the central bloc is still looking for a single candidate. But that's to attribute a lot of ambition and intentions to this former French vice-champion in synchronized swimming in the early 1970s. She then became a business lawyer in the United States, minister to Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, then general director of the International Monetary Fund, succeeding Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Machine-translated from French