Two Names Emerge to Succeed Lagarde at the ECB

Politico Europe reported this week that Pablo Hernández de Cos and Klaas Knot have emerged as the front-runners to replace Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank. The two bring long records in monetary policy, the outlet wrote, and sharply different memories of the Draghi years. No appointment has been made.

Both men have led national central banks and sat on the ECB's Governing Council, the body that sets rates for the euro area. The presidency is filled by eurozone governments acting through the European Council, after consulting the European Parliament and the bank itself; the choice is political as much as technical, and it binds the governments that must live with the bank's decisions.

The reference to Draghi is the part that matters in Rome. Mario Draghi ran the ECB from 2011 to 2019, through the sovereign debt crisis that twice drove Italian borrowing costs toward the point at which a debt becomes self-fulfilling, and his pledge in July 2012 to do "whatever it takes" to preserve the euro halted the slide. The spread between Italian and German ten-year bonds remains the daily gauge the foreign press uses for Italian risk, and each succession at the bank is read against that precedent.